Elon Musk must think it is hilarious that he has been tasked by Donald Trump to head up a new “Department of Government Efficiency”, which bears the acronym of “DOGE”.
Musk, who bought Twitter and changed its name to “X”, once temporarily replaced the familiar Twitter icon of a blue bird with the dog logo of Dogecoin, a cryptocurrency that started as a joke and seems to greatly amuse Musk.
The Dogecoin logo is based on a dog meme based on a photo of a Shina Inus (or Shibes), a dog breed from Japan. The cryptocurrency’s name is based on an episode of a puppet show video on YouTube from “Homestar Runner” in which one of the characters misspells dog “d-o-g-e”.
In an article about the DOGE, which Trump tasked Musk to run along with Vivek Ramaswamy, the New York Times criticizes the latter’s suggestion that one easy way to achieve a major cut in government spending would be to fire 75 percent of federal employees. Showing a chart of the data, the Times shoots back that the proportion of the US population working for the federal government is “lower now than when President Reagan was in office.”
Therefore, the Times argues, “overstaffing should not be the first thing on the agenda” of the DOGE.
“If anything,” the Times continues, “the problem may more often be understaffing in key positions: The federal government doesn’t have the people it needs to adequately monitor and vet its enormous streams of payments to defense contractors, hospitals and individuals.”
The data cited by the Times‘ is not limited to civilian employees of the federal government. It includes federal contractors and grant recipients, members of the military, and US Postal Service workers. We can reasonably assume, though, that the trend is the same for the subgroup of federal employees as for the larger group of people whose incomes depend on taxpayers being robbed of the fruits of their own labors.
The conclusion does not follow, however, that the government spending on federal employees’ incomes is not still wasteful.
As for the other benefactors of this system of legal theft, a sufficiently “d-o-g-e”-worthy response from Elon Musk might be, “Yeah, well, fire them all, too!”
In fact, just fire the whole damned government! Problem solved.
No more illegal wars of aggression waged on a pretext of lies.
No more US taxpayer support for the crime of genocide.
No more government-enforced medical cartel masquerading perversely as a “health care” system.
Etcetera, ad nauseum.
Every politician in Washington, including all the psychopaths, sociopaths, and narcissists, could just go home; and we could even eliminate the unnecessary “Department of Government Efficiency”. (Ain’t it funny how the government has to create yet another executive agency for the ostensible purpose of shrinking the government? Kinda like how the government had to bankrupt Spirit Airlines to save it, which is like how, during the war against the people of Vietnam, the US government had to destroy the villages to save them.)
Moving on to what I really wanted to talk about from the opinion article, though, at the foot of it, the author, Peter Coy, includes the following tangential note:
Elsewhere: Well, So Much for Facts
Information that highlights benefits from international trade can backfire by making people support it less, particularly if they’re Republicans, a study has found. Showing people research that demonstrates gains such as lower consumer prices “induces protectionist policy choices,” Laura Alfaro of Harvard Business School, Maggie Chen of George Washington University and Davin Chor of Dartmouth College wrote in a working paper released last month. Information that is “dissonant” with prior beliefs seems to make many people “double down” on them, they wrote.
Coy evidently would have us believe that this dismissal of facts in favor of anti-free-trade policies applies most peculiarly to Republicans. As though Democrats are more willing to accept facts about the benefits of free trade because they aren’t as biased against free trade.
That take didn’t make much sense to me, so, not trusting Coy’s characterization of the paper, I consulted it; and, sure enough, as usual, what the study actually found is quite different from how it is presented in the New York Times.
It is true that the “backfire effect” was observed to be larger among Republicans, but that is just an artifact of the five years of the study’s sample period, which was from 2018 through 2022, thus starting under the Trump administration, which implemented its “America First” agenda of imposing harmful tariffs that ultimately rob most Americans for the benefit of certain preferred industries that have formed a tight crony capitalist alliance with the government.
As the paper notes, Trump’s tariff policies were largely continued under the Biden administration.
Basically, the reason Republicans were biased in favor of rejecting factual information about the benefits of free trade was because they supported Trump’s “America First” agenda.
This is just basic human confirmation bias, to which, of course, Democrats are hardly immune. People tend to form opinions first and then select which facts suit their positions instead of first getting the knowledge and then drawing a conclusion.
As the paper states,
Republican and Democrat supporters move in opposite directions in the intensity of their protectionist preferences following the information treatments, with each side’s updating in their beliefs on trade being biased toward their respective party-line priors, instead of toward the actual content of the information.
Peter Coy was ironically demonstrating the same type of confirmation bias by selecting the point about the “backfire effect” being more pronounced among Republicans without taking into account the period of study.
“We see an analogous pattern in Democrats,” the paper states, “who appear to update toward the trade policy position of the party they identify with (i.e., being less opposed to trade restrictions) regardless of the content of the narrative.”
The key finding of the study was that both Democrats and Republics tend to accept or reject facts about free trade depending on the political context: specifically, whether the facts would lead one toward favoring or opposing the policy implemented by the party’s guy in the White House.
As the study authors put it,
The information treatments interact in a significant way with several markers of individuals’ priors on trade, most notably with their political identity as a Republican or Democratic party supporter: When the received information is dissonant with the trade policy positions of the party they identify with, it instead reinforces their preferences in favor of their priors (rather than in favor of the conveyed information).
How fitting that a New York Times columnist would cite that paper to take a swipe at Republicans while downplaying the key finding that neither Democrats nor Republicans care particularly much about economic reality because they place more value in being seen as a loyal member of whichever cult they find themselves in by virtue of their predetermined opinions.
Here are some relevant observations that both craniums of the two-headed beast dutifully choose to ignore:
“It is not merely that all its visible gains are offset by less obvious but no less real losses. It results, in fact, in a net loss to the country.” — Henry Hazlitt
“[P]rotectionism is not only nonsense, but dangerous nonsense, destructive of all economic prosperity. . . . Protectionism is simply a plea that consumers, as well as general prosperity, be hurt so as to confer permanent special privilege upon groups of inefficient producers, at the expense of competent firms and of consumers. But it is a peculiarly destructive kind of bailout, because it permanently shackles trade under the cloak of patriotism.” — Murray Rothbard
“Tariffs that save jobs in the steel industry mean higher steel prices, which in turn means fewer sales of American steel products around the world and losses of far more jobs than are saved.” — Thomas Sowell
“True enough, because of the artificial price increases, new jobs have been created in the protected industry. But what is not seen is the fact that the extra money now spent for iron must necessarily result in reduced spending for other products and services, and thus fewer jobs in those industries. And worst of all, the people have been encouraged to think that robbery is moral if it is legal.” — Frédéric Bastiat
Cross-posted from JeremyRHammond.com.
