The Donald, Elon and efficient government

These ideas are always fun and they also near always run into the usual bureaucratic quicksands:

Donald Trump has said he will hire Elon Musk to save the US money by cutting government costs if he wins the November election.

Obviously, we wish them luck if circumstances make the experiment possible and all that. But the lesson of what Musk has done at Twitter needs to be kept in mind. An 80% fall in staff headcount with an - at worst - mild decline in performance seems acceptable.

But simply to think of firing 80% of the government isn’t quite the point. For the thing that Twitter did was identify what didn’t need to be done any more. Like, armies reading every tweet to see if they should be allowed.

Now, yes, it’s possible to say that people shouldn’t say hurty things online. Our view being that if free speech doesn’t include being able to say hurty things then speech isn’t free enough. JS Mill was right about fists and noses that is. The shift was that if hurty things may be said then the army of hurty checkers was no longer needed.

The same is true of government. It isn’t just that the entire edifice is grotesquely overstaffed with people doing nothing - which, obviously, it is. It’s that government is doing many things which, even under the most favourable analysis, only very marginally need to be done. Not doing those things might - maybe - at that margin very slightly degrade the lived experience. But not having to pay for them to be done will so improve life through fructification in the pockets that overall life will improve.

That is, it’s not that we merely want more efficient government. It’s that we need less government.

The trick to reforming government is not, as so many businessmen drafted into it so often mistakenly think, to do it better. It’s to do it less.

Tim Worstall