What Elon Musk Doesn’t Know Will Hurt You and Already Has
As of the latest market close, Elon Musk is worth approximately $400 billion. By many measures, he is a success and his fortune proves it. It is very easy for someone who is considered so successful to believe he is extremely smart. Smart in every way. Capable of understanding and improving on anything that crosses his path.
Drawing this conclusion however — that because Musk is smart in one area of life, or several areas of life that he is smart in all areas of life — is a mistake, because it assumes facts not in evidence.
On February 11 Musk was invited into the Oval Office of the White House to say a few words about his efforts to reduce government waste, fraud and abuse. He ended up speaking for about a half hour while also trying to manage his four year old son. His remarks demonstrated how little he knows or understands the government he is being allowed to disassemble. What he had to say was mostly wrong and in several cases troubling.
The Bureaucracy
Musk thinks he is the first, but he is not the first person in government or in American society to complain about or be concerned about an un-elected bureaucracy having too much power. The bureaucracy is Musk’s main target as he sets about breaking things, because as any demagogue knows, to be successful you need a faceless enemy.
In the Oval Office he said the bureaucracy has broken “the feedback loop” between the people and their government. The bureaucracy has more power than the president or members of the House and Senate, he said.
Even if this were true, and it is not, the bureaucracy’s power comes only from the Congress and the Executive. Congress writes the laws and builds a bureaucracy to implement those laws under the management of the president. The president has the further power to direct the manner in which the laws will be enforced. The Judiciary has the power to interpret the laws and resolve disputes.
The bureaucracy is not a mob that rose up to create the space program or the Department of Agriculture. The whole thing — the government — was created by Congress as an expression of the will of the American people over a period of 250 years. If it is to be trimmed, Congress and the president can do it, consistent with the needs of the country. The approach Musk is taking removes the people from the process. He is not saving us from the bureaucracy, he is unilaterally deciding what is in our best interests.
Put simply, the American people created the bureaucracy through their elected representatives, by voting for it. The whole thing — the whole government as it exists today — is the direct result of decades of elections and their consequences.
This is not to say that Musk is wrong about everything. He may have indeed discovered waste, fraud and abuse. In an operation as big as the U.S. government it does not take a genius to do so, but the way to go about fixing it is by using the process we have in place to make change rather than relying on the whims of one truly un-elected bureaucrat with no accountability.
There was so much nonsense and ignorance on display during Musk’s Oval Office drop-in that some of the more troubling aspects of what he had to say may have escaped immediate notice.
The $30 Million Question
As President Trump sat and listened to Musk carry-on, the president turned to Musk and asked him to tell the reporters in the room about the federal employee with a large bank account. Musk carefully, but gleefully told the story which raises serious questions.
Musk said his work had uncovered a woman — a federal employee — with a net worth of $30 million. Without accusing her of a crime, Musk wondered out loud, in front the news media how a woman who made “a couple hundred thousand dollars a year” could have a net worth of $30 million. He implied that level of financial success could only be achieved through fraud, specifically by stealing from the American taxpayer.
Think for a moment not about how the woman in question made $30 million. Think instead how Musk knows her net worth, why he knows her net worth, what he is going to do next with the information he has, and what he has the power to know about your net worth and other personal information the government stores on all Americans.
This is a clear case of an abuse of power by Musk and the White House. There is no reason for Musk or the White House to have that level of detail about anyone’s financial information and there is no reason for either Musk or the president to share the information — even without a name attached — to the general public. The only parts of the federal government that should have access to that kind of information are appropriate regulatory and law enforcement agencies.
And by the way who is Elon Musk, who is Donald Trump, both men of considerable wealth, to decide the appropriate net worth of their fellow Americans? Is this a right granted to the super rich? I’m certain that it is not a rule enforced by the bureaucracy.
In the end, Musk has made an honest mistake. He believes his success in making rockets, electric cars and all the rest means he a genius in all subject areas. He is not. He doesn’t understand the basic fundamentals of American government and he has been given the keys to the whole system by a president who knows even less.
