The solution to waste is central planning. That can cut down on trillions in wasteful spending.
Taking a step back, and looking at the big picture.
But if you don’t do that, then you can’t even identify the waste.
Then you end up like DOGE: Looking at a 7 trillion dollar budget, and struggling to find a couple billions in waste. Having to exaggerate in order to pretend that you managed to find 1.5% of waste.
And with most of these cuts being to stuff that is useful.
The DOGE way is useless.
Even if it wasn’t just a completely corrupt thing, where a businessman is getting to cut funding on the agencies that regulate him.
Even if they actually did try to find waste, and not just to find ways to further enrich Elon, it could never work.
You’d struggle to find 100 billion to cut, and it wouldn’t make a dent in the deficit.
It’s like if you get a 1% pay raise: What good does that even do you if costs are going up by 5% per year?
If you want to cut trillions, then you can’t scrutinize every department individually, you need to look at the bigger picture.
Imagine some government in a third world country has loads of people without access to clean drinking water and sanitation.
So they spend a LOT of money on things like subsidizing purchases of water bottles from private corporations.
They spend tons of money on trying to fight cholera.
They spend money on counselors for people who lost their kids to cholera.
They have expensive doctors on standby to help people who have cholera, so some of them survive.
They spend money on some kind of sick leave for people with cholera, and re-employment programs to get them back into the work force.
Employers spend money trying to figure out how to run a business when half the employees might just not show up one day because they all have explosive diarrhea.
People sell little water purificators, and water treatment tablets.
People walk on foot to the river to carry water, and then burn animal dung in order to boil it so they can have something to drink.
When you are in a system like that, if you focus in on any single part of it, it’s hard to find waste.
You go and examine the tons of money that is spent on the people who have cholera, and you get something like this:
Turns out, they are spending all the money fighting cholera.
You can go and examine the women who are carrying water on foot, and again, you’ll find very little waste there, they are probably already taking the most direct path.
You can make some TINY improvements.
Switch the women over from carrying traditional clay pots, to cheap plastic crap, that is more polluting, but not as heavy, doesn’t break as easily, and is just cheaper.
So you can save like $2 here and there.
Maybe they can get slightly more efficient stoves, so that they have to burn a little bit less dung in order to boil their water.
Another 50 cents saved.
But then at the end of the day, since you spent money on consultants and so on to try and find those $2.50, well it’s moot, it ends up having no impact at all, or being completely negligible.
These women carrying water are not idiots.
They are just… being “rational”, in a free market.
They need water, they figured out the cheapest way for them to get the water, and they do that. If it was less effort to get hired, and then buy water bottles, and they had that option, then they’d do that instead.
They are already doing everything they can to minimize their costs, and maximize their output.
They’ll switch over to the cheaper plastic buckets so they can carry a bit more water, moved by market incentives.
The guy who is selling water treatment tablets is also just a businessman in a free market. He’s already trying to be as efficient as possible, and keep the rest as profits.
The doctors who are treating cholera are also trying to be efficient. They try to come up with the most effective cures and treatments.
Every little self-centered actor is trying to be as efficient as possible.
And when you examine them under a microscope… You can’t ever find much waste, only tiny, inconsequential improvements.
In order to even SEE the waste, in order to notice it…
You have to take a step back, and look at the bigger picture.
As soon as you step back, and look at the whole thing… Well suddenly, all of the waste becomes glaringly obvious.
Then you can develop something like a water treatment plant, set up an infrastructure of pipes and sewers, and have clean tap water and toilets.
But in order to be able to even think about something like municipal tap water, you HAVE to take a step back, and look at the bigger picture.
Because if you look at just ONE of the women who is carrying water… Well then switching her to a plastic bucket makes sense.
While investing 20 million in a water treatment plant makes no sense at all.
If you look at ALL of the women who are carrying water, then suddenly building an aqueduct or laying pipes makes a lot more sense.
If you look at all the women carrying water, and also at the trucks carrying water, and also at all the energy that goes into boiling water, and all the money that is spent on doctors who are fighting cholera and so on…
And then you even zoom out a bit more, and you look at the costs of all that over the next 5 to 10 years?
Well then it becomes incredibly obvious that municipal tap water is needed, that it’s a way more effective solution.
Suddenly, you can look at the women who are carrying water on foot, and notice that it’s actually a lot of wasted time and effort in the long run.
But to do that, you need to zoom out, you need to look at the bigger picture, to have a central plan, so you can look at ALL of the costs, of the current system, and compare it to the alternative.
Because if you zoom in on the women carrying water… All you can see is how efficient they are with their plastic buckets, and their direct paths.
If there is a shortcut available to the river, I can guarantee you she is already taking it, she has optimized the path, like any rational actor in a free market would.
She has already compared the cost of building an aqueduct to the cost of a plastic bucket, and chosen the cheapest most efficient option, that would get her the most bang for her buck.
At a small scale, and in the short term, it’s just cheaper and less work to fetch water with a plastic bucket than to try and build an aqueduct.
At a small scale and in the short term, municipal tap water or an aqueduct seems wasteful.
“Years of work, and how much money to build an aqueduct for some water?
Girl, get a plastic bucket and move your ass to the river like everyone else. It will get you water much faster, cheaper and with less effort.”
One thing to note, is that cutting down on waste in this way, while insanely profitable for society in the long run, does often require some initial investments.
You need to actually build the municipal tap water infrastructure. So in the short term, it actually requires spending even more money than before. To then cut down on waste, and save billions down the line
And the other thing is that it would destroy the economy.
Less waste = less work, less money spent.
All the people employed to apply band-aid fixes end up out of a job if the problem is solved.
It’s a bit like how if you want to move away from private health insurance, and towards universal healthcare, then all of the useless bureaucrats and paper pushers from the private health insurance industry end up unemployed.
Universal healthcare could eliminate approximately 1.8 million administrative and insurance-based jobs.
If you are wasting money employing people to dig holes and fill them back in, and you want to stop that waste, then the people who were employed doing useless work end up unemployed.
Looking back at the third world country where women are working hard to fetch water on foot, to earn their water…
There are hospitals that have been built, and doctors who are specialized in cholera treatment.
There are people paid to gather animal dung, and people building little stoves, so the water can be boiled.
The are businesses selling water purification tablets, and there are businesses selling plastic buckets to carry water.
The CEO of the bottled water company will point out how much extra work there is for everyone, how he’s creating jobs, and how municipal tap water would destroy many of those jobs, as well as much of his wealth and profits.
All the business owners will be marching in the streets, protesting municipal tap water, declaring that government should just stay out of people’s lives, and that central planning of water distribution by the government is a socialist fantasy that can never work.
They’ll talk about free markets, and how the women carrying water in plastic buckets have been lifted out of poverty by capitalism, and that the CEO of the bottled water company is already lifting people out of cholera.
They’ll say that people should just be less lazy and entitled, work a bit harder to boil their water, and then there would be no more cholera.
They’ll declare that if clean water is too expensive for a lot of people, it’s probably just because of some kind of government regulations.
They’ll say we should stop checking if the plastic buckets are food safe or not, and that way the free market will produce cheaper buckets, and help reduce costs for those women carrying water.
They’ll blame the high cost of bottled water on workers having too many rights, and too much pollution being outlawed.
They’ll say ANYTHING to try and preserve their wealth and power, their profits, their jobs, their investments.
The people who profit from the waste LOVE the waste. They will block any attempts at reducing waste.
If you look at this same concept when applied to something like modern day USA, cities who bulldoze away homeless camps are like the women carrying water.
They’ve invested in the bulldozers, in the plastic buckets.
A bulldozer is a very efficient way to clear a homeless camp, very cost effective.
There isn’t really a cheaper way to push problems out of sight.
There are people cleaning shit off the streets.
With modern equipment, so they can do it efficiently, he’s not scrubbing by hand, he has his plastic bucket.
When homeless people sleep under a bridge, or on a public bench, spikes and stuff are installed.
Very cost effective way to avoid having people sleep there, cheaper than the bulldozers, or paying security guards to come harass the homeless and move them along.
When homeless people who live in shitty unsanitary conditions inevitable get sick and have to be taken to the emergency room, there again, they try to cut down on costs, and be as efficient as possible.
They’ll stabilize the homeless guy, and then dump him out the back.
Totally the cheapest and most efficient thing to do in the short term.
When you zoom in on each individual issue, then it all seems very efficient, everyone is trying to be efficient.
The homeless have upgraded from building shacks out of corrugated tin and scrap lumber, and are living in modern tents, much more cost effective, they are also trying to optimize, and looking out for their own personal short term interests. They also have switched to plastic buckets.
When you look at just one single homeless person, who is being taken to the hospital…
Well, actually treating them seems like a waste of money, when they could just be stabilized, and then dumped back on the streets.
Stabilize and dump is a cheaper, more efficient way to get rid of them.
You start to zoom out a bit, and see that they then remain sick, and then need to be stabilized and dumped again and again, and suddenly it all seems a lot less efficient.
Zoom out a bit more, notice ALL of the money that is spent on the healthcare to stabilize and dump people, the money spent on the bulldozers, and on regularly cleaning up shit from the streets, and the money spent on guards and police and prisons to try and punish the shit out of homeless people, all the money that is spent on repeatedly buying new tents after the old ones get bulldozed away, all the money spent on covering the city in anti-homeless architecture, etc…
And then suddenly, instead of seeing a bunch of stuff that is all very efficient, you are able to notice all of the waste, and come up with much cheaper solutions, like housing first.
Put the guy in a place with a toilet, and then you don’t need to cover the city in spikes, and to have regular bulldozings, and to constantly try and flush the streets because the city itself has become a giant toilet.
Give the guy actual healthcare, to treat the issue and not just stabilize him, and you cut down on costs in the long term.
If there are mental health issues and addictions, well again, you provide some treatment to help people, and it cuts down on costs drastically in the long term.
You just have to zoom out a bit, look at the bigger picture, and then all of the waste becomes glaringly obvious.
But you need to do that to see it. Otherwise, you only see efficiency, and never find the waste you are looking for.
