The Department of Government Efficiency has been having a busy week. According to a Trump spokesperson, DOGE has set up a website that provides transparency with regard to their findings. Elon Musk has been declaring that he’s interested in finding the truth in the way government departments handle money. He’s been finding inappropriate dispursements that aren’t labelled as to who they went to or even how much…a sign of fraud and abuse. And there are more monetary abuses than missing payment information which are being revealed much to the chagrin of those who were enjoying dipping into that money flow.

Because so much money misuse has been uncovered so quickly, I am cautiously optimistic. I hope that the DOGE is using it’s powers judiciously and appropriately. I am hoping that they are stopping people from stealing more money. I am hoping that those who have been stealing from the public’s coffers will be identified and prosecuted. Apparently many who may be guilty of such crimes have begun to panic. So far though, it appears that DOGE is mostly just trying to stop the outward flow of inappropriate payments to who knows who what and where and some other government departments will deal with prosecuting the people who have been stealing and dealing in these monies.

Whenever someone says that they are worried that DOGE is acting inappropriately, I just wonder if that person or group is guilty of taking some of that easy to get cash that has been bleeding the United States into poverty. Did that person have a cash connection? President Trump stated optimistically that some of the treasury accounting may have exagerrated the deficit and debt and therefore, the United States may be in better financial shape than any of us thought.

I heard at least one group attribute this statement to some other outcome than discovering cash resources previously unaccounted for. That someone would disparage found money made me doubt the impartiality of that opinion. Because a lot of people have been taking money inappropriately. Secret money, secret money connections, secret money destinations, bribes, influence. Balancing the books finally is something that makes me feel less helpless as I have long watched problems developing that are affecting us all and I feel a little happier about a potentially better tomorrow.

Go DOGE!

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I keep hearing about attacks against Trump candidates for office. During the first Trump Administration, the Brett Kavanaugh accusations were motivated politically and a lot of accusations can be made for political reasons. While I think that a person’s morals are important, they are no longer relevant to appointments when baseless accusations are clearly being made to block people. Matt Gaetz just dropped out of the Attorney General candidacy because of accusations. These accusations arose after his candidacy threatened the Washington D.C. establishment. There were no criminal convictions to disqualify him. I think he shouldn’t have dropped out. And I think that entertaining the notion that baseless accusations should be heard is ridiculous. This isn’t the Victorian Era. And the reason that Washington D.C. needs to be changed is because of corruption regarding public service. That’s the kind of corruption that we need to focus on rather than accusations of private impropriety. Let’s stop allowing interested parties to play the game of virtue signalling, chasing down rumors and entertaining falacies for the purpose of blocking needed change.

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If you were in a terrible car accident, would you be able to get the medical interventions to repair your body that you need in order to return to a normal life? Or if you had an unexplained medical problem, could you get the help you need in order to resolve it? Would you trust your doctor to order tests that would help you instead of just ordering as many billable tests as the doctor can to increase their profit? Would the Doctor give good advice if the need was for something simple? For example, if you had sinusitis would he order a CAT scan and surgery if rinsing your sinuses with saline would have been sufficient to repair the problem?

If someone sued you in a frivolous lawsuit, could you find and afford a good enough lawyer to win your case? When you hire someone to work on your house can you do anything if they take your money and run without doing any of the work? What if the work is grossly below standard…could you get your money back from the first guy and still hire the better worker after that?

How much of what you have tried to achieve in life can be protected in a nation that isn’t practicing rule of law governance? NONE. All the good hard work you did in the past just might be for nothing. How can you protect yourself when you do anything now or in the future? You can’t. The reason that I make this point is because Joe Biden is trying to issue a Pardon for his son Hunter Biden retroactive to cover any crimes he may have committed over the last several years. If he can do this, how much rule of law operates here in the U.S.? What can any of us do if there isn’t really legal oversight or legal consequences for certain groups, like politicians, bankers, healthcare experts?

You can keep on going. You can keep on trying. And you will. But there aren’t any guarantees or even realistic assurances when investors can monkey around with real estate prices and double triple or quadruple the prices or the government can regulate cars out of existence or beyond your price range, or taxes keep going up, or groceries cost twice or three times as much, or AI systems boot you right out of any hiring pool of applicants for employment that you are qualified for without explaining their unknown reasons (and 40% of job ads online are fake, but no consequences to advertiser for lying to applicants). Etc etc etc.

Lets hope that things get better.

Our ability to make them better through our work and careful money savings or investment has been harmed by frauds of many kinds and by monopolies. Does making good choices still bring success? Can diligent efforts by ordinary people to do the right thing still work towards bringing them success in a system without virtuous markets or a system without moral politics?

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Overvalued traits and undervalued ones:

Single examples of human genius are over-valued without appreciating the normal sequence in a human lifespan where a person is born, matures, raises kids, gets old and then dies. Geniuses are supposed to be brilliant and figure out how to solve flashy problems but this puts a lot of pressure on them to be superhuman. A normal human lifespan isn’t appreciated or valued or supported with a system that has stable employment or without wishing by and large for an infinite lifespan instead of a finite one. Raising children doesn’t seem to be valued at all.

The perfect product is valued but it has to have superlative qualities and be mass marketed whereas products made independently by hand are undervalued even though humans have been making things for their own use for thousands of years. Mass production undervalues individual know-how and creativity. And remember that humans are part of mass production in most cases by running machines or overseeing processes. The human element is still playing a role.

Human agency is undervalued in the neoliberal workplace where people are seen as similar, even interchangeable, and expected to do whatever they are told to do without reasoning about what that is or what its consequences might be. This is in contrast to old mantras in medicine like “do no harm,” or Peter Drucker’s assertion that people have values and that they should carefully match their personal values to what they are doing at work; if the value sets don’t match, he thought, they should leave. J.S. Mill thought that with small men, no great things are possible.

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The power of organizations and what they can accomplish is overvalued for instance in government bureaucracies, while the power of individuals living life and making independent decisions is undervalued even though this is a freer arena where more options remain open all the time, giving society more flexibility. One of the problems with bureaucracy is its resistance to necessary change. Influencers have become tools of organizations without being held to standards of truth-telling. Truth is undervalued when peddling influence.

Secresy and subterfuge is overvalued and above board dealing is undervalued. Take for example voting in America. The ability for groups to cheat in elections has been more highly valued than the fidelity of our voting systems. That’s really a shame.

Censorship has been overvalued and freedom of speech, or freedom of expression, has been undervalued, especially recently since the Covid caper. Censorship is all about aggression to tell people what to do, what to think and to limit their choices while eliminating accountability for the wrong choices being made by organizations.

War has been overvalued under neoliberalism and peace has been undervalued. If state and corporate actors profit from warmaking, those people collecting money from war want more war all the time. This is tragic and a disaster for everyone.

Reality is undervalued under neoliberalism and fantasy has been elevated to new heights. But reality matters. Green energy including solar and wind is undermined by real limits of copper and steel, for example. Pretending that any idea can work if enough people believe in it is foolish. The real world always influences what is possible.

Partnerships between the most powerful players in government and industry are overvalued and individual lives are undervalued. Government picking economic winners and losers is overvalued while damage to individuals by externalizing costs to them is underappreciated. The risk of fascism leading to mass death is underappreciated. Yesterday, I read that inflation is likely to kill more people than the covid caper. What do you think about that? Do you see an end to inflation any time soon?

Hiring managers don’t want to hire older workers. Yet it is hard to get a return on investment for expensive training when the average time a person can work in a job is so short now. On balance, youth is undervalued and old age is undervalued. Older people aren’t valued for their knowledge or wisdom. It takes a full lifespan to see how wrong even careful choices can go. It takes a lifetime to alter what we believed when we were young when we see more of life and learn about life. But youth is also undervalued in terms of being socially nurtured towards successful outcomes. Financialization has undermined the success of young and old alike. Valuing humans has gone awry in the neoliberal era. Young people are often told to expect robots to take on their role in the workplace. Young people in school are being told that AI is smarter than people, even though that isn’t true. We have algorithms but not intelligent computers. Human intelligence matters as much as ever now, but it is undervalued in the neoliberal age.

We all live in the neoliberal era right now. What do you see as undervalued and overvalued? How can we improve our society? How can we invest in processes and value human life in a way that can help society to grow and improve?

Accelerationist policy is when the government picks economic winners and losers. It’s a policy based on the idea that the government should guide economic growth by sponsoring certain kinds of growth and blocking other kinds through either regulations and laws that stop growth or permit growth or by making loans unaffordable or unobtainable to certain groups while other groups can get affordable loans. It’s the idea that government knows best how to guide economic growth. It’s a bad policy that is failing America.

Ludwig von Mises abhorred accelerationist policy. Because it leads to problems like the ones that we see everywhere across the U.S. today.

Accelerationist policy was behind the Great Recession when insolvent banks that gambled on real estate were saved after the real estate market crashed. It’s behind the end of Glass Steagall laws that once protected people from being harmed by financial gambles. It was behind the Affordable Care Act that raised the cost of healthcare for all Americans while lowering care quality. Accelerationist policy is why algorithms that value real estate at such high prices are in widespread use so that over half of all Americans can’t afford a mortgage in a monopoly price fixing scheme. It is why so many students got loans for a university education of dubious quality and utility and also why students can’t discharge that debt by declaring bankruptcy when they can’t find work. It’s why the way that we measure unemployment has changed so that we don’t count longterm unemployed people who can’t get a job. It’s why cars cost too much after regulatory mayhem to make cars more carbon neutral or why cars have so many costly gadget add-ons like back-up cameras. It’s why insurance of all kinds costs more now. It was behind the Covid Caper.

Accelerationist policy laughs at death and mayhem. It’s the Bugaboo of modern times.

It’s how the Federal Reserve implemented ZIRP that has removed interest on savings. It’s why you can’t get interest on money by saving money….because the government wants you to be motivated to spend your money immediately. It’s why old people can’t make it once they stop working and also why the government needs old people to never stop working and also why algorithms now screen applicants to screen out elderly ones that can’t ever get a job now. And no one can find out why a perfectly qualified applicant is screened out by the AI software.

It’s why there aren’t winning options for so many of us.

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ADDENDUM: Interventionism or interventionist policy is the older term for government interference in the economy; Accelerationist policy is the rebranding of the old term by American government think tanks.

I stopped by a career councillor’s site the other day to see what this career councilor had on offer. She had some testimonials about how people experienced help when they sought her out. I listened closely to a few stories and I noticed that her clients were pretending that we are all living in the same economy as the one that existed in the 1990’s. That’s not the case. This economy is battered, beaten and fake. Taxes and inflation are higher. What worked in the 1990’s won’t work now. Having nostalgia for that 1990’s economy won’t help you to get a job in today’s economy. So I left the website.

Pretending isn’t what I was after.

I hoped the councillor would tell me how to trust this economy of 2024. I got the answer that I expected. Pretending isn’t enough.

The interventionist economy is one where foolish people have imagined that our government can pick economic winners and losers. There are people working in government who try to do that and who believe that boosting on-paper economic performance with government help is a good political and economic strategy. (This won’t work economically because it doesn’t allow competition between political equals to decide the best economic winners by virtue of their economic performance).

The interventionist economy is also one where selfish people believe that MMT can fundamentally change an economy of scarcity (the most essential feature of a real economy) to one with never ending abundance (government money printing can’t produce real value to back the currency).

The interventionist and MMT economy has failed to produce widespread prosperity. It will continue to fail.

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Economies do better when they function in the context of beneficial optional exchanges between individuals under a system where rule of law applies the law to all people equally. As economic connection falls away from all of us because of rampant elite criminality in government and the private sector, the economy is becoming a place that excludes most Americans from earning a gainful existence through work.

That’s the trouble with non-prosecution of elite criminals in banking, in healthcare, in courts, in government. People who are in a protected class who can commit crimes that hurt ordinary people in order to get their hands on wealth that they didn’t earn ends the favorable connections present in a virtuous economy. That’s where we are today.

Fake elections similarly erode the beneficial network influence of representational politics.

When I hear about electronic money backing the U.S. dollar, when I imagine how electronic money demand is supposed to allow more dollar printing to keep the wheels of commerce spinning, I know that won’t work to restore economic connections that are virtuous. When I hear about splitting assets into smaller pieces so that the price can go up past what ordinary person can buy in total, I know that that won’t work either. Just more pretending.

Scarcity is a real feature of the real economy. Using MMT to pretend that scarcity doesn’t exist doesn’t change an economy into one with unlimited resources. The complex adaptive system that is an economy has a network of connections that are destroyed when criminals who harm our economy aren’t prosecuted.

As important as networks are in developing computers, it must be obvious to the IT world that these get-rich-quick systems will eventually fail. This will leave all of us who are excluded from the favored criminal network to live on without needful economic connections that will work for us. And the criminals escaping prosecution will not be able to help the economy to prosper either. Look closely. This economy is broken.