Zohran Mamdani, who became mayor of New York City several months ago promising the most ambitious—and proudly collectivist—use of city government since the days of socialistic Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, last week launched a Commission On Government Efficiency (C.O.G.E., echoing Trump and Musk’s D.O.G.E.) that will purportedly trim waste and red tape.
Some of the kindest and most thoughtful political commentators on Earth would at this point pause politely and say, back off a bit if an authoritarian takes a baby step in the right direction, maybe even give him words of encouragement.
In all likelihood, though, these same people would excoriate you for taking a wait-and-see attitude toward some other political figure they like less. Decades of watching politicians and political activists have taught me that the responsible attitude to take is: never trust them at all, don’t give authoritarians an inch, and assume that if they reverse course even for an instant it’s merely so they can more effectively tyrannize you later, not because they’re well-rounded or have had a change of heart.
C.O.G.E. is a superficially market-like move that just happens to come immediately on the heels of Mamdani being humiliated by billionaires who refused to bow before his taxation threats. It’s worth remembering that other political leaders who also had approximately zero interest in shrinking government had similar fig-leaf programs.
Al Gore, back when he was Bill Clinton’s vice president and (in terms that were undeniably slightly ahead of the curve) talked about wanting to become the country’s living “central processing unit” for information and democratic decision-making, headed the so-called ReGo project (REinventing GOvernment) that mocked numerous regulations but eliminated none.
Even young libertarians like me at the time reacted with some optimism to the push, exactly as the government intended us to do, but my fairly apolitical computer scientist friend Chuck Blake cautiously noted that Gore and his handlers had carefully picked regulations for criticism that were already irrelevant for reasons having nothing to do with government downsizing.
Gore’s favorite on-air stunt during the ReGo rollout was to explain the ludicrous detail with which government regulators had to report the durability of ashtrays in government offices, counting for safety purposes how many pieces the ashtrays broke into if shattered. Great! That was red-tape-mockery worthy of libertarian Dave Barry, conservative P.J. O’Rourke, or unusually-sane liberal Sen. William Proxmire (of annual Golden Fleece Awards fame), all influences on my young mind.
But as my friend Chuck noted, by the time Gore was mocking government ashtray regulations, it was already illegal to smoke in government buildings. There were no ashtrays to regulate and thus no cutting of red tape forthcoming on that front. It was all, so to speak, a smokescreen, like virtually everything government does, whether at the behest of the party you like or the one you don’t. Learn to hate both. Intensely. Now.
It’s perhaps fitting—perhaps even an intentional not-so-inside joke—that the Gore effort, which most of us who remember it at all still think of as the “Reinventing Government” project, technically changed its official name from ReGo to NPR—for National Performance Review. If there were some New Democrats genuinely thinking it’d be easier to downsize government if they could say to center-left constituents, “NPR says this will yield benefits,” perhaps I should applaud the subtle propaganda effort, but just as likely the new abbreviation was intended as a winking reminder that most government projects are treated as sacred and never budge. Breathe easy, bureaucrats!
Keep all that in mind when Musk admirably allows himself to become the most hated man in America by using D.O.G.E. (the Department Of Government Efficiency) to push spending cut suggestions that get almost entirely ignored by Trump and Congress—and denounced 24/7 by the left and even by some of the snootier and more traditional-process-fetishizing classical liberals.
And keep ReGo, D.O.G.E., and now C.O.G.E. in mind as Ezra Klein (with some help from interviewer Jon Stewart) pushes the “abundance agenda” as a seemingly market-like war on government bureaucracy and red tape that, curiously, is touted not so much as a way to unfetter businesses, customers, and civil society but as a way to get rid of impediments to huge government projects such as high-speed railroads that can’t happen if they have to jump through all the government’s own environmental regulatory hurdles.
“Abundance” in this context is less like a glimpse of freedom than like two factions of a socialist apparatus having a mild, friendly disagreement about priorities, with the citizens’ range of motion an afterthought.
Demagogue Mamdani is slightly more skilled at making this sort of thing sound liberating, though. He says in his C.O.G.E.-unveiling press release, “New Yorkers deserve a government that works as hard as they do—and a government as careful with their money as they are... For too long, bureaucracy has stood in the way of delivering the housing, transit, childcare and public services our city needs. The Commission On Government Efficiency will take a hard look at how City government functions and identify the reforms we need to deliver faster, smarter, and more effectively for working people. Restoring faith in government starts with proving government can actually deliver.”
Note that the Mamdani language above says nothing about the private-sector activities stifled by that bureaucracy he now plays at disliking, only (a la Klein) about government getting in its own way. But the best way, the only surefire way, to get government to “actually deliver”—to get it out of the way of humanity’s diverse and individually-chosen real projects, including the infinitude of free-market ones—is to eliminate government at every opportunity. Why let government keep assuming it’s in a position to decide what is permitted?
—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey