作者：加雷特·莫洛伊 (Garret Molloy)
“普通公民将政府机构的运作与他更熟悉的盈利系统进行比较……为什么不采用私人企业已经实践过的方法呢？……通过任命商界人士担任各部门负责人来推行官僚改革是徒劳的。这种计划源于对民事政府目标的根本误解……[私人企业高效] 是因为利润和损失报表占据主导地位……而官僚管理的问题恰恰在于缺乏这种计算方法。”
——路德维希·冯·米塞斯，《官僚主义》
DOGE（即“政府效率部”）旨在消除臃肿的官僚机构所带来的危害，但其策略所涉及的论调存在危险的谬误。从埃隆·马斯克、维韦克·拉马斯瓦米以及特朗普总统的官方声明来看，DOGE 的目标包括“削减多余的法规，减少浪费性开支，重组联邦机构”，“加班加点确保你的税款被明智使用”，并创造“前所未有的创业式政府管理方式”。然而，历史告诉我们，政府不可能真正实现“创业式管理”、“高效使用税款”或“削减浪费性支出”。
唯一的选择是在通过政府低效提供服务和通过私人市场高效提供服务之间进行权衡。因此，DOGE 想要真正实现其目标，唯一的方法是大幅减少政府的角色和范围，而不是对其进行经济化管理。
DOGE 并非新创意
在过去一个世纪中，试图让官僚机构像私人企业那样运作的改革多次尝试，但都屡屡失败。从富兰克林·罗斯福的布朗洛委员会，到赫伯特·胡佛的“科学管理建议”，再到吉米·卡特的绩效评估、比尔·克林顿的“重塑政府”计划、让·克雷蒂安的“加拿大服务计划”、玛格丽特·撒切尔的“新公共管理”，以及托尼·布莱尔的“现代化政府关键绩效指标”改革，所有这些尝试都未能奏效。
上述国家的官僚机构规模、占国内生产总值的政府支出比例，以及对经济的监管负担，在这些计划实施后都变得更大了。
这些改革失败的根本原因在于，它们忽视了效率低下并非官僚机构的缺陷，而是其必然属性。官僚机构永远无法像私人企业那样运作，因为它们并不处于私人市场的框架之中。
官僚管理的内在矛盾
私人企业高效的原因在于利润和损失报表的至高无上。利润动机确保企业的目标是减少成本而不影响结果的市场价值。而官僚管理的问题恰恰在于缺乏这种计算方法。官僚机构可以同时增加成本并降低最终产品的市场价值，却无需承担任何责任。
例如，政府官僚可能会制定不具备市场价格的环境规则。即便我们希望给所提供的服务设定市场价格，也无法做到。因此，官僚机构必然不受利润动机的约束。不幸的是，这种必然属性还导致了诸如花费 40 万美元建造一个自行车棚、200 万美元购买一台打印机，以及 7500 万美元修建一个未使用的机场等浪费现象。
虽然历史上的这些改革在短期内成功实现了一些节约，但这些短期的经济化在长期中证明毫无意义。一旦政府失去改革的热情，官僚机构就会回归其固有的臃肿状态。埃隆和维韦克或许能够立即削减一些浪费性项目，比如“花费 10 万美元研究龙舌兰酒和杜松子酒是否使太阳鱼更具攻击性”或“花费 100 万美元研究可卡因是否使日本鹌鹑更具性欲”。然而，如果他们无法限制官僚机构的职能范围，这些机构迟早会再次回归到浪费状态。
扩张本能与浪费问题
官僚机构的工作人员有着强烈的动机去扩大行政控制权并支持更多的开支。这并非因个人品德问题而导致浪费，而是制度性的结果。每个人都希望拥有更大的预算来推进自己的优先事项并解决监管问题。官僚并不会直接感受到剥夺公民收入所导致的经济停滞影响，而只会感受到自己在监管领域所带来的变化，这使他们倾向于过度消耗资源。更甚者，那些选择成为官僚的人往往在哲学上更倾向于支持大政府。
从本质上讲，这些官僚在市场框架之外运作，因此可以在提供低质量工作的同时规避惩罚，也缺乏高效分配资源的激励。此外，他们还有强大的结构性动机来不断寻求更大的预算和更积极的监管。
DOGE 的未来：减少政府职能
如果 DOGE 想要实现其目标，就必须认识到历史和米塞斯的警告：低效是官僚机构的内在属性。我们只能通过减少政府在社会中的角色来减少其规模，而不是试图提高其效率。
阿根廷总统哈维尔·米莱（Javier Milei）的“滚出去”（“Afuera!”）政策，即大幅削减政府职能范围的做法，值得借鉴。我们需要对福利政策、劳动法规和执照要求等进行审查，最终结束或大幅缩小这些领域的政府干预范围。
相比之下，经济化管理要容易得多。这种在干预主义和非干预主义之间进行权衡的过程将遇到最深层次的阻力，但也将是实现 DOGE 使命的最富成效的途径。通过这样做，DOGE 可以阻止官僚机构的持续扩张，收回原本被低效使用的纳税人资金，并让美国人从政府的枷锁中解放出来。
自由市场所赋予的潜力为我们带来了从科技到选举权的一切。摆脱过度官僚约束的美国将能够孕育一个多行星种族、基因定制医疗，以及推动人类不断进步的创新。唯一能够约束官僚机构的方法是减少其职能范围，而不是让它变得更高效。一个高效的官僚机构只是危险的乌托邦幻想。
滚出去！（Afuera!）
最具哲学智慧的属相
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To Elon and Vivek: Unless DOGE Learns From History, It Will Fail
Garret Molloy
“The plain citizen compares the operation of the bureaus with the working of the profit system, which is more familiar to him.. Why not adopt the well-tried methods of private business… It is vain to advocate a bureaucratic reform through the appointment of businessmen as heads of various departments. Such plans stem from a radical misconstruction of the objectives of civil government… [Private businesses are efficient] because the profit-and-loss statement is supreme…The problem of bureaucratic management is precisely the absence of such a method of calculation.” - Ludwig Von Mises, Bureaucracy
DOGE (the Department of Government Efficiency) seeks to undo the harms of bloated bureaucracy but the rhetoric concerning their strategy is dangerously flawed. The official rhetoric from Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, and President Trump states that it will, “slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures and restructure Federal Agencies,” “[work] overtime to ensure your tax dollars are spent wisely,” and create “an entrepreneurial approach to government never seen before.” However, as history has shown us, there can be no meaningful “entrepreneurial approach to government,” no “efficient spending of tax dollars” and no “cutting of wasteful spending.
There can only be a tradeoff between providing services inefficiently through government and providing them efficiently through the private market. Hence, the only way for DOGE to truly succeed in its aims is to dramatically reduce the role and scope of government, not economize it.
DOGE is not a new idea. Reforming bureaucracies to run like private businesses has been tried many many times in the last century. These reforms however have repeatedly failed. Franklin D. Roosevelt's Brownlow Committee, Herbert Hoover’s ‘scientific management proposals’, Jimmy Carter's performance evaluations,’ Bill Clinton’s "Reinventing Government" Initiative, Jean Chrétien’s ‘Service Canada,’ Margaret Thatcher's “New Public Management," Tony Blair's “Modernizing Government for Key Performance Indicators,” all tried to make the government run as a private business.
Yet they failed– every country aforementioned has a larger bureaucracy, a larger proportion of GDP spent on government, and a larger regulatory drag on the economy than it had before these programs began.
All these initiatives failed precisely because they ignored the fact that inefficiency is not a defect of bureaucracy that can be corrected but a necessary element of it. Bureaucracies can never function as private businesses because they do not function in the framework of a private market.
Private businesses are efficient because the profit-and-loss statement is supreme. The primacy of the profit motive ensures the aim is to reduce costs without impairing the market value of the result. The problem of bureaucratic management is precisely the absence of such a method of calculation. Bureaucracies can both increase costs and impair the market value of the final good provided without any reproach.
No customer may switch to an alternative provider and no bureaucrat goes out of business. For example, government bureaucrats develop environmental rules that have no price on the market. Even if we wanted to put a market price on the services provided we could not. It is thus a necessary property of bureaucracies that they are not chastened by the profit motive. Unfortunately, these necessary properties also include spending $400,000 on a bike shelter, $2 million on a printer and $75 million on an unused airport.
While all these historical initiatives made successful decisions to economize in the short run. These short term economies all proved irrelevant in the long run. Once governments lost their reforming zeal, bureaucracies reverted back to their natural state. Elon and Vivek will be able to immediately cut wasteful projects that spend “$100,000 to study if tequila or gin makes sunfish more aggressive or $1M to study if cocaine makes Japanese quail more sexually promiscuous.”
However, if they are unable to limit the competencies that are allocated to bureaucracies, these bureaucracies will once again revert to this level of waste.
Instead, bureaucrats have strong incentives to expand administrative control and to support more spending. It is through no fault of personal character that these bureaucrats engage in egregious waste. Everyone wants a bigger budget to enact their priorities and solve regulatory issues. Bureaucrats never directly see the stagnating effects that depriving citizens of their income leads to, only experiencing the impact they make on their regulatory domain, fundamentally biasing them towards overconsumption. Not only that, those who choose to become bureaucrats are also the ones most likely to be philosophically aligned with big-government.
In essence, these bureaucrats operate outside a market framework so they can get away with low-quality work and have no incentive to allocate resources efficiently. They also have strong structural incentives to persistently seek larger budgets and more active regulation. DOGE will be well placed to solve economizing problems like $5.3 billion of payments to recipients who may have been ineligible for federal support. However, if they adopt this policy of economizing they will fail to recognize both history and Mises’s warning: a necessary quality of bureaucracy is inefficiency. We can only reduce its size by reducing its role in society.
Thus, the only method that prevents an active reversion to bloat and waste, involves deciding what roles the federal government should no longer assume and removing these competencies from bureaucracies. Javier Milei’s policy of “Afuera!” (get out) where the Argentine’s government competencies were significantly reduced is the model that should be mirrored. It will involve evaluating the likes of entitlements, labor regulations and licensing requirements, to end or reduce their scope significantly.
Economizing is an easy job comparatively. These tradeoffs between intervention and non-interventionism will produce the deepest resistance but they will also be the most fruitful in achieving DOGE’s mission. In doing this, DOGE can halt the continued expansion of bureaucracy, reclaim taxpayer dollars that would have been otherwise inefficiently spent, and give Americans freedom from the government’s yoke.
The human possibility that free markets enable has brought us everything from our technology to our voting rights. An America unconstrained by an overzealous bureaucracy will produce a multi-planetary species, genetically tailored healthcare, and innovations that continue to propel humanity to ever greater heights. The only way to constrain bureaucracy is to reduce its competencies, not make it more efficient. An efficient bureaucracy is a precarious utopian fantasy.
Afuera!
