Tyranny and “Efficiency” — How True Efficiency Empowers Our Resistance

TRANSCEND MEMBERS, 31 Mar 2025

Glen T. Martin, Ph.D. – TRANSCEND Media Service

25 Mar 2025 – The “Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)” is dismantling the US government. Why is the word “efficiency” applied to this group of institution-wreckers delegated by a tyrant? It helps to be clear about the meanings of the word and to understand why it is a favorite word of tyrants and how it is part of the propaganda system generated by oligarchs.

Say, hypothetically, that we have a federal bureaucracy made up of persons (that is, beings like ourselves since we are all persons). Say that this bureaucracy claims to be part of a democracy that is composed of persons. Persons in USA democracy are defined as citizens before the law who have rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (as well as due process, freedom of speech, assembly, habeas corpus, etc.). If we want that bureaucracy to be more efficient, then we need to assess carefully (1) whether each person’s job is necessary for good governmental functioning and (2) whether each of them is doing their job in the best ways. There are procedures already in place to do this. A wrecking-ball will not accomplish this. Destruction is the opposite of efficiency.

In fact, that is why each bureaucracy has supervisors and annual performance evaluations, etc. The system has evolved to make these kinds of evaluations on a regular basis. However, to eliminate people’s jobs arbitrarily without following these steps does not give us anything resembling “efficiency.” It simply violates these people’s constitutional rights to due process and fair treatment before the law. Therefore, DOGE is a lie from the very beginning. It is not about efficiency at all unless “efficiency” is defined as what is done by the single tyrant to impose his will of others. Why does the word carry such prestige as a propaganda tool?

If a tyrant is in power in some country and wants to make changes or eliminate what he takes to be inefficiency in the bureaucracy, what is the most efficient means to do this? He could take his case to the people and make rational arguments that changes need to be made. He could take the case to the legislature with similar arguments, or he could take the case to the courts, which require evidence, arguments, and due process. If the courts and/or legislature are following the Constitution then (1) they may approve the requested changes and (2) they would need to establish due process procedures for making these changes without violating the rights of those employed to life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, and equal due process before the law.

The fact that Trump and Musk have done none of this reveals that they are not concerned with any notion of “efficiency” with regard to our society and the fact that society is composed of persons-in-community. Rather, their idea of “efficiency” appears derivative from classical capitalist economic theory.

Traditional economists often use a criterion of efficiency that they call “Pareto-optimal,” named after the anti-democratic Italian sociologist Vilfredo Pareto who, in the early 20^th century was one of fascist Benito Mussolini’s teachers and who was given an honorary post by Mussolini after the dictator came to power in 1922. Pareto said that if a situation moves from state A to state B, and if at least one person prefers the second state and no one prefers the first state, then B can be said to be “Pareto-superior” to A. And if there is no third state of affairs, C, preferable to B, then B is “Pareto-optimal. Capitalist economists often argue that their idea of “economic efficiency” is best because it gives us a Pareto-optimal system.

But notice the assumptions here. Say, for example, there are 5 persons who have $1000 each (call this state A), then one person gets another $1000 so that you now have 4 with $1000 and 1 with $2000 (state B). In economic jargon, it may be that no one is worse off so state B is Pareto-superior, and if there are no other alternatives, Pareto-optimal. But what if person 5 gets $100,000?

Does that condition make anyone worse off? The answer is “no” if you are a classical economist using classical economic assumptions. Each of these 5 individuals are understood as an “economic atom” (that is, they are each an economic abstraction not a living, breathing member of a community with rights, dignity, feelings, and multiple relations with others). They are economic atoms within a “free market.” “Freely” interacting as market abstractions, one gets $100,000 and the others keep $1000, so the market has acted “efficiently to increase wealth and we are Pareto-optimal.

But suppose these people are in reality not abstract atoms but persons-in-community (which all persons are), then the other 4 are indeed worse off— because a large disparity in wealth affects the freedom of the other four and the dynamics of the community as a whole. “Economic efficiency” entirely ignores our reality as persons-in-community and gives us the kind of abstract technocratic thinking resulting in the fact that Trump’s three friends together (Musk, Zukerberg, and Bezos) have a combined wealth equivalent to that of the poorest 170,000 Americans. The economic system is indeed efficient in the sense of “Pareto-optimal.”

In fact, it is by now well known that the purpose of dismantling the US government by Trump and DOGE is to rob billions of dollars from the American people to help pay for yet another big tax break for the super-wealthy oligarchy that rules in the United States. It is no accident that Trump appointed 13 billionaires to his Cabinet and that they are all coordinating with him in the dismantling and looting of our government. What is most efficient for tyrants is simply to use force to consolidate their power and rob people of whatever wealth they might have. This efficiency comes straight out of standard capitalist economics.

Any product requires an input of capital in the form of materials, overhead costs, labor costs, transportation costs, etc. When the product is sold on the market and there is a return on these investments that is greater than their sum, then there is a certain percentage of profit. What is “efficient” in capitalism is cutting the costs of the input as much as possible in order to maximize the profit. These are simply mathematical sums that can be calculated by formulas.

What does not appear anywhere in these equations are “calculations” of (1) human well-being or (2) the well-being of the ecosystem that makes this entire system possible. Hence, exactly the same formulas and the same striving for an increased profit-margin applies to farmers who may really want to feed people and to weapons manufacturers who want to ever more efficiently destroy people. The idea that economics should have the goal of the well-being of people and their planet simply does not enter into the formulas of classical economics.

When human beings with rights and dignity enter the picture, classical economics is at a loss to deal with it. Frank Ackerman and Lisa Heinzerling in Priceless: On Knowing the Price of Everything and the Value of Nothing, write:

The basic problem with narrow economic analysis of health and environmental protection is that human life, health, and nature cannot be described meaningfully in monetary terms: they are priceless…. Formal cost-benefit analysis often hurts more than it helps; it muddies rather than clarifies fundamental clashes about values…. Again and again, economic theory gives us opaque and technical reasons to do obviously the wrong thing…. Cost-benefit analysis provides a deregulatory agenda under the cover of scientific objectivity.

They continue: “Most or all of the costs are readily determined market prices, but many important benefits cannot be meaningfully quantified or priced, and are implicitly given a value of zero.” What price can you put on a human life? or human mental and physical well-being? or the future of our children? or a livable environment for humanity? These are priceless, and conventional economics cannot deal with these kinds of values. Because they cannot be quantified, it assesses their value at “zero.” Hence, “efficiency” becomes blind growth (like a cancer), blind accumulation of wealth for its own sake.

Following British economist Kate Raworth, I will distinguish between “Cuckoo Economists” who use abstractions that have little to do with the reality of human or planetary life and “Common Sense Economists” who claim (believe it or not) that economics should be in the service of human flourishing and well-being. As we saw in our simple example above, an economics that takes the well-being of persons into consideration could never result in the production of multi-millionaires or billionaires. Such wealth, Cuckoo economists tell us, is “Pareto-optimal” (since there are simply no alternatives to “free market” capitalism).

But this is simply nonsense. Such wealth is plainly obscene in a country where the poorest 100 million are simply struggling to survive from day to day. Its very existence is a crime against democracy and the American people. This is just common-sense for anyone who stops to think for at least two minutes (this leaves out most of those in the US Congress and Senate). If “efficiency” is what serves the well-being of real human beings and our planetary ecosystem, then it may be that institutions like healthcare, social security, a housing authority, and a department of education are all striving for real common-sense efficiency.

As a matter of fact, Senator Bernie Sanders and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) have been touring the country promoting exactly this kind of common-sense economics to huge gatherings of American citizens. It is not that these common-sense ideas are new. Rather, they simply have been ignored by the dominant economic and political classes. As early as 1934 in his book called Technics and Civilization, Lewis Mumford defined “efficiency” as the use of technology to enhance the quality of life for human beings. He said that “efficient” use of technology would increase human leisure and decrease the hours we need to work while at the same time providing prosperity.

French thinker Jacques Ellul was more discerning of where the obsession with “efficiency” was taking us in this 1964 book, The Technological Society. He saw that technical “efficiency” was taking away human freedom. Within the economic-technical system: “He does not make a choice from complex and, in some way, human motives. He can decide only in favor of the technique that gives maximum efficiency.” The consequence of this, Ellul said, is that “even when the state is resolutely liberal and democratic, it cannot do otherwise than become totalitarian.” Like “Cuckoo” economic efficiency, its sister technological efficiency is totalitarian at its core.

In Beyond Growth, published in 1996, Common Sense economist Herman E. Daly declared of our present system that promoted “glorification of self-interest and a scientistic-technocratic worldview…. [its] expanding power and shrinking purpose lead to uncontrolled growth for its own sake, which is wrecking the moral and social order just as surely as it is wrecking the ecological order.” Daly concludes that, “no system that uses resources at a rate that destroys natural life-support systems without meeting the basic needs of all can possibly be considered efficient.” If economic efficiency is about the well-being of people and our planet, that certainly is the case. If “efficiency” means growth and the accumulation of wealth for its own sake by any means necessary, then we have Trump, Musk, and DOGE.

What were we thinking when we elected Trump? Surely, we knew he represented the worst of the system of “efficiency” that concentrated more and more wealth in fewer and fewer hands and that cared for nothing about human well-being or the precious environment that sustains us. In his 2007 book The Enemy of Nature, Joel Kovel observes that “capital’s iron tendency to produce poverty along with wealth and to increase the gap between rich and poor means that capitalist society must remain authoritarian at its core.”

That is surely why the billionaires worked to put Trump in power. A real democracy focused on human dignity, rights and well-being would not need a dictator to keep the peace. But the misery of the poorest 40% of the American people requires a huge police force, a huge prison complex, and dictatorial powers to keep the wealth flowing from the poorest into the hands of the few.

Kate Raworth declares in her 2017 book that, “Today’s economy is divisive and degenerative by default. Tomorrow’s economy must be distributive and regenerative by design. An economy that is distributive by design is one whose dynamics tend to disperse and circulate value as it is created, rather than concentrating it in ever-fewer hands.” Economics for Raworth is not an inevitability, given to us in dumb formulas like “Pareto optimality,” and it is clearly not a science. It is (or should be) a system that we design in order to promote human well-being and protect the environment.

Bernie Sanders and AOC are showing people how easy it would be to design our economy to benefit everyone and not simply the 1%. If people want a decent life for themselves and their children, it is time they started fighting for it. Get rid of all these Republican sycophants who are enabling Trump. Then get rid of all these hypocritical Democrats who speak out of both sides of their mouth. Let’s have politics of the people, for the people, and by the people. A real republic; a real democracy.

Common Sense economics is about an efficient use of resources, person-power, technology, and governmental institutions to provide well-being for all and to limit those dimensions of excessive wealth that destroy equality before the law and distort the democratic process. “Efficient” can either mean a blind, mechanical mechanism for increasing wealth (the Pareto-optimal option), or it can mean using our resources democratically for the common good of everyone. A market may help efficiently balance production and consumption in certain sectors of life, but sectors directly connected with human dignity must be clearly off limits.

Like the outmoded economics of Stalinist Communism, libertarian “free market” capitalism is an ideology that has run its course. It is dead in the water. If we want democracy that works for all of us, we must tax these multi-millionaires and billionaires. There is plenty of wealth for all of us and plenty of room for free or low cost, quality healthcare, daycare, social security, housing, education, and other institutions that improve the quality of life for us all. We are at a turning point in American society that can go either way. The vast majority must unite under the banner of common sense.

In his 2024 book On Freedom, historian Timothy Synder calls freedom “the fifth dimension.” Out of its 4 dimensions (the three dimensions of space plus time), the universe has produced another dimension: human beings who can imagine that things in the future can be different from things in the past. That is the dimension of freedom and the realm of our dignity that cannot possibly be formulated into the Cuckoo economics of our present economic system. It is a system, in his words, in which “we don’t have to think about people as individuals with purposes: markets with do the thinking for us.”

A system that funnels super wealth into fewer and fewer hands is the enemy of freedom, and Donald Trump is the epitome of that system. But also (under the cover of the “free market”) the entire oligarchy has been working since at least the time of Ronald Reagan in the 1980s to dismantle democracy and impose an oligarchical tyranny. Synder points out how absurd it is (inefficient) to have a healthcare system in which people’s sickness and illness increases private profit. It both incentivizes fraud and decreases health. How absurd it is also to have private prisons making money for owners off the deprivation and disenfranchisement of a large portion of society (mostly black people).

Freedom arises from the fifth dimension (where the goal of democratic government is something “priceless” like human dignity and well-being) and requires both democratic economics and governmental forms that encourage and educate us in the acquisition of a multiplicity of values. As Daly says above, the present system of Cuckoo economics “is wrecking” not only people and our planetary ecosystem, but our moral capacity itself.

That is, it destroys our ability to assess the past as lacking and move toward a future that more closely embodies truly human freedom and values. That is why democracy is the only credible form of government or economics. The fifth dimension reveals our common humanity. It is our priceless human reality and dignity gifted to us by the universe. This needs to be the foundation of our resistance to Trump’s tyranny. We are each living embodiments of this unquantifiable 5^th dimension, and the only justification for government is that it be organized to enhance and empower this freedom.

I would add that we need such a system of freedom for the entire world. The state-run capitalism of China denies freedom to a billion people just as the oligarchical structure of Russian society inhibits the freedom of the Russian people. The US is fast moving to conform to these other two rival forms of tyranny. It is time we united the world under a democratic economics and politics that recognizes humanity’s fifth dimension, the dimension of freedom and values that I described in my recent book Human Dignity and World Order. To see what I am saying, also check out the Constitution for the Federation of Earth. Real efficiency means a happy, healthy, and free human population within a healthy, sustainable planetary environment.

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Dr. Glen T. Martin:
– Member, TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment
– Professor of Philosophy Emeritus
– Founder/Chairperson Emeritus, Program in Peace Studies, Radford University
– President, World Constitution and Parliament Association (WCPA);
– President, Earth Constitution Institute (ECI)
– Author of twelve books and hundreds of articles concerning global issues, human spirituality, and democratic world government; a recipient of many peace awards.
www.earthconstitution.world – Email: gmartin@radford.edu

This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 31 Mar 2025.

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