The stories of the Vasa and North Korea’s destroyer comprise all the elements of personalized government run amok. Inflated, unrealistic and impractical ambitions. A willful, puffed-up leader eager to demonstrate his own superior insight and put his stamp on history. A sycophantic courtier class with no one gutsy enough to tell the Great Man that the damn thing won’t work.
We have to hope we’re not headed for a Vasa moment of our own. Analogies are certainly available. The “Big Beautiful Bill” now in Congress, with an essential core of avoiding a massive tax increase, has a top-heavy upper deck of its own: think no taxes on tips, overtime or auto loan interest and an increase of the indefensible federal deduction for state and local taxes.
But the closer, and more worrisome, comparison is our own maritime monstrosity, the USS Protectionism. While out of dry dock, it is still close to shore, not yet fully testing its fitness for the open seas. If ordered to sally forth and do all-out tariff battle with our trading partners, it is likely to meet its own tragic fate, in economic suffering here at home, coupled with long-term damage to valuable international relationships.
The Trump administration has plenty of people who know how dangerous and impractical the full-bore tariff policy would be. One of them should say so, and if it means resigning or being fired, so be it.
Many Republicans in Congress see the risks and know as well that unfettered presidential authority to set tariffs — which is to say, tax levels — violates the spirit and likely the letter of the Constitution. Credit to those few who have advocated the recapture of the legislature’s rightful Article I jurisdiction.
Archaeologists recovered the Vasa in 1961, and with it the remains of some of its sailors and passenger soldiers. Until someone tells the president that his beloved ship isn’t seaworthy, we’re all passengers — and all in jeopardy.
Matt Welch applauds Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY). A slice:
Paul may be grudgingly open to forcing National Guard troops into riotous situations, but he’s no fan at all of this Saturday’s big military parade in Washington, D.C., on the president’s 79th birthday.
“If I say picture in your mind a military parade, I challenge anybody not to think of the Soviet Union or North Korea, because that’s the only image that pops into my head,” he said. “It’s like, yeah, we can commemorate. We can talk about how great our military is. But you know, missiles and tanks in the streets just isn’t a great symbol. A free country is a country with a limited government, and really not one predicated on a massive military.”
Despite being singled out by Trump and Miller, at a time when the modern GOP has embraced explicitly antilibertarian populism, Paul seems energized by current and future GOP battles over spending, tariffs, price controls, and censorship.
“I think there’s going to be a struggle for the direction of the Republican Party,” he said. “The populists are … anti-Big Business, they’re antimerger, they’re for micromanagement of things…they hate vertical integration. And it’s like, who are these Neanderthals? Vertical integration is simply a way to try to compete and reduce the price of the product by vertically integrating. It’s part of the economic development of capitalism, and they want to ban it. I mean, we have these lawsuits against Google and others for selling stuff that is compatible with their other stuff. It’s just ridiculous, but it comes from this populism.”
Scott Lincicome argues that DOGE “might end up being worse than ineffective in the long run.” Three slices:
Perhaps DOGE’s greatest accomplishment was simply to focus the public on profligate government spending. As Cato’s DOGE report notes at the outset, “government debt, already historically high, is set to explode to unprecedented levels on policy autopilot over the next three decades, risking some combination of high inflation, slower growth, and federal default.” While much of this debt requires systemic reforms, it undeniably includes a massive amount of spending that’s wasteful by any reasonable definition. Cato’s Ryan Bourne reminds us, for example, that the famously sympathetic Government Accountability Office estimates that “the federal government loses between $233 billion and $521 billion annually” just to fraud. The same GAO report adds that since 2003 the government has made $2.8 trillion in “improper payments” (not necessarily fraud but erroneous in some way), but “the actual amount may be significantly higher” because the figure is based on only the “small number of programs” that are required to report such totals (itself a big problem!).
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The problem, of course, is that DOGE’s good intentions and discrete victories can’t be judged in a vacuum, and its bad mistakes are piling up.
For starters, Cato budget hawk Romina Boccia explains, Musk and company wildly underdelivered in terms of durable federal spending cuts (something even Musk himself now acknowledges).
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Relatedly, much of the government waste and fraud identified by various reports also requires congressional action because it’s hardwired into large U.S. spending programs designed by Congress. As Cato’s Michael Cannon notes, for example, the best way to reduce the billions in waste, fraud, and abuse in Medicare—one of the biggest fraud magnets—is to convert it into a Social Security-like cash-transfer program, which would “avoid scammers, eliminate wasteful expenditures, and punish high-price producers (including insurers)—because enrollees themselves will reap the savings.” More moderate approaches to eliminating Medicare waste and fraud require similar structural changes.
Such reforms aren’t something DOGE can do. They require Congress, as do other changes that would dramatically streamline government programs and reduce fraud (often by converting them to lump-sum cash payments instead of in-kind benefits).
Bigger, structural reforms—eliminating entire agencies, cutting vast swaths of the workforce—often need Congress, too. And, as Cato’s DOGE report helpfully reminds us, a major improvement in government waste can truly come from only a major reduction in the size and scope of government itself.
What free market economists might actually have done well over the past few decades is hold back some of the worst excesses of this tendency for a while. Adam Smith told us that the economic world is governed by largely unseen forces like incentives, prices, and information that rarely coincide with our instincts, and recognizing those forces might have helped put a brake on instinctive politics. Yet today those forces are dismissed as inconvenient, and intuition is heralded over analysis.
We see this most obviously in the return of mercantilist thinking. We are told by no less a figure than the President of the United States that a trade deficit is a bad thing and represents unfairness, and that reducing that deficit through the tool of tariffs will bring back jobs. Many, if not most, people agree with this.
Yet economic thinking tells us otherwise. It tells us that we get substantial value for that deficit, that tariffs will do little to reduce deficits and may indeed increase them, and that tariffs kill jobs as well as create them. The objections of economists to the administration’s tariff policies are, however, dismissed as “free market fundamentalism” or worse.
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Another bipartisan example is the idea of industrial policy — that requirements of domestic sourcing and government-led reshoring can lead to more jobs, higher wages, and prosperity for all. This can be portrayed as a patriotic policy, a pro-labor policy, or even a pro-environment policy; all three were present in the glut of spending bills at the end of the Biden administration.
Yet economics again should have given pause. These measures, whether “buy American!” or a “green new deal,” raise costs, reduce competitiveness, and, like tariffs, invite retaliation abroad. The economic literature finds government industrial policy to be largely inefficient. When we learned that lesson in the last century, rules were put in place to require rigorous cost-benefit analysis and the like, but over time those were diluted and then eventually ignored or dropped entirely.
