A Fool And His Money Are Soon Parted – Elon Musk And The Augean Cleansing Of The American Government

Progressives firmly and unquestionably believe that government should be a friend, a companion, a caretaker, and an adviser.  Without it the people would be an inchoate, soulless rabble.  They would be foundering, lost sheep prey to the wolves of Wall Street and capitalist America.  We, say progressives, are the only thing that stands between enlightened civil governance and anarchy.

Of course no one believes this except those who advocate for social interventionism and benefit from it - printing money, spending it as though it grows on trees, having little to do with it once it pours down the sluice, but taking credit for every penny.

Everyone who gives even a desultory look knows that the trillions of dollars Biden authorized for ‘infrastructure’ and ‘social welfare’ was little more than a scam, enriching everyone with his hand out down the line – governors of blue states who welcomed the generosity and caring counsel of Washington, aides and associates who decided where the fictitious bridges, rail lines, docks, and runways were to be built; county supervisors and municipal mayors whose stock went up for having brought home the promise of wealth, jobs, and development; and contractors whose cuts, emoluments, incentives, and cost overruns for work never done was money in the bank – their banks.

Everyone knows that ‘infrastructure’ means boondoggle, light loads, more sand than cement, and years of haggling over who gets what when.  Washington DC’s city council authorized millions in non-competitive awards to local contractors to rebuild perfectly good sidewalks when the streets of the city looked like bombed out, cratered Third World tracks. Many split-levels in Gaithersburg and Cadillac Escalades were bought thanks to that ‘investment’.

When the city said that the wheelchair-confined needed smooth, even surfaces to ride on, progressives for whom the word ‘disability’ alone all but guaranteed unaccountable millions, wrote a big check.

‘Social welfare’ is another progressive cash cow.  The black, the poor, the marginalized ipso facto need ‘our’ help, and little does it matter that job training, special education, welfare, aid to dependent children, and food stamps have cost-effectiveness ratios in minus figures.  

Most of USAID’s similar overseas programs have the same objectives and the same lack of accountability, thanks to the political nature of foreign aid.  If a country has oil, gas, or rare earth minerals; or if they are in a geopolitically good place for the United States, the money trough is filled, no questions asked.

 

Up and down Independence Avenue, in one government department after another, the same charade goes on and on.  Doing good, caretaking, stewardship, enlightened management – whatever progressives might like to call it – is one big, grand Ponzi scheme. From forests to the inner city, from COVID to whooping cough, from union bosses to creative investment instruments, from farm subsidies to immigration, money is being spent with inattention, inspired neglect, and downright political corruption.

It is the nature of public financing to be spent on political interest rather than cost-benefit or cost-effectiveness.  It is a business of syllogisms – doing good is good for America because doing good is good – and out of that intellectual chicanery everyone but the taxpayer benefits.

The only truly savvy place in America is the inner city, for decades the beneficiaries of government largesse.  Residents there know that for every dollar of entitlement money disbursed by federal and local authorities, little if any is seen after takes and cuts are made.  In DC preachers, community leaders, social activists, local non-profit directors all have their hands out for walkin’ around money. For the rest of Anacostia and Brentwood, ‘We ain’t seen jack shit’

 

So along come Elon Musk and DOGE ready to do battle.  The Emperor’s new clothes are seen for what they are.  For decades government officials from top to bottom of the public service food chain have looked the other way as bureaucratic institutions have authorized entitlements, non-accountable grants, and monies for bridges and highways never to be built.  Finally the naked, sublimely disingenuous bureaucrats have been collared and thrown out, money flow stanched, and some semblance of logical order instituted. 

The outcry has been loud and predictable.  For years bureaucrats and their contractors have had a free ride.  Few questioned the need for job training or welfare for the underprivileged because it was the right, good thing to do, and now the great Washington shibboleth was being attacked.  For the first time public servants were tossed on the curb no differently than private sector employees who work at will and at the mercy of private owners and managers.

It has been a juggernaut, Elon Musk a Genghis Khan taking no prisoners, leaving heads on spikes up and down Constitution Avenue sending a message to those who might defy him.

Why on earth would anyone want to stop the uprooting of a corrupt federal government and saving billions in taxpayer dollars?  Only those who enable big government are upset, for with each cleansing, the wasteful, fraudulent, venal political insides of the bureaucracy are exposed.  It is as bad for progressives as a Jeffrey Epstein client list.  Their names will be all over the inconsequential, unsupervised, carelessly self-interested programs funded with taxpayer money.

Progressives, already on the run after their humiliating defeat at the hands of Donald Trump, are now in even more hysterical disbelief.  Big government, the heart and soul of Democrat, liberal, progressive policy for ages, is coming down, turned to dust and rubble; and shocked and incredulous, they can only stand by and watch.

The rest of the country is delighted.  The United States will return to its origins, to federalism, small government, private enterprise, and individual freedom – the freedoms enshrined in the Constitution, but more so the freedom from government.

Big Government’s last hurrah, the end of bureaucratic days, the re-launching of a conservative, practical nation – not so much Making America Great Again, but returning it to its fundamental, Enlightenment, individualistic roots.