November 25, 2020

Corrupters, power mongers and conservatives use efficiency fraud as a pretext for destroying social structures. Destructivity is supposedly a necessary method of improving, even when processes are ultra successful.

Everything always needs to be more efficient particularly when successful. Success means there is too much waste in the process. A losing operation is needed for being most efficient.

The Trump administration multiplied the fraud beyond all previous bounds, gutting staff, removing equipment and dislocating offices to improve efficiency of the bureaucracies. Experienced personnel were replaced by incompetent know-nothings who would support totalitarian fascism. Unqualified persons were supposedly more efficient.

An underlying concept is that success and functionality represent inefficiency, because leanness is the essence of efficiency, and nonfunctionality is the primary measure of leanness. Lean means a lot less of everything, while functionality means more of everything.

Efficiency is the amount of output relative to the amount of input. It's a dividing process. Output is in the numerator and input is in the denominator. The ratio is efficiency.

In that ratio, the numerator has to be large, sometimes through increase, and the denominator has to be small, sometimes through decrease.

But qualities can replace quantities. Then something of value must be sustained or increased while the requirements for producing it must be diminished or not increased as much as the value is increased.

Brainless corrupters have been getting by with murder in perverting the meaning of efficiency. They have a standard methodology. It always works the same way. They destroy complex functions by reducing them to nonfunctionality and call it efficiency.

A fake logic goes with all corruption. Just as corporations burning tax dollars is said to improve the economy, fake efficiency guts social structures claiming to save money.

There is a fake mathematics to destruction of efficiency. Start with total dollars involved, then subtract some dollars—usually the most critical ones—and claim the reduced amount is increased efficiency.

That process is nothing resembling efficiency. Any old definition of efficiency would expose the fraud of it. Yet corrupters keep getting by with it decade after decade.

Corruption always has the purpose of destroying something, while fakery pretends to be improving something. So the overriding concern is the consequence. The secondary concern is the methodology. But corrupters always promote and rationalize the methodology as the excuse for the destructive consequence, as if destroying were collateral damage in saving dollars under the pretext of efficiency.

With that mechanism and result, the whole significance is in what is being destroyed. Yet the destructivity is passed off as a necessity for the abstractions of fraudulent efficiency. In doing that, the claim of efficiency in burning dollars is fraud.

A recent example is Louis KillJoy gutting the Post Office. (Name-calling mockeries are supposed to be part of the Trump government.) The supposed purpose was to increase efficiency. The first step was to fire most of the experienced managers. Know-nothings would improve efficiency. The next step was to dismantle 700 automatic sorting machines.

Notice that no money was saved in dismantling machines. It costs money to take machines apart and move them. The fake logic was that having less property on location and moved to someplace else was in increase in efficiency.

The most extreme example over the past fifty years or so was the International Monetary Fund (IMF) gutting the economies of all or nearly all undeveloped countries. The process was "loan sharking" by throwing large amounts of money away and then making someone pay for it with exorbitant interests on the debt along with "structural adjustments," which means gutting the functionality of government and social structures. But, of course, it wasn't called loan sharking; it was called efficiency. To pay for it, social structures were gutted by firing a large percent of the employees. The result was nonfunctionality being called efficiency.

Austerity is the general concept for doing that. Gutting organizations and firing workers is called austerity, while functionality is reduced. In other words, the numerator of the efficiency equation is destroyed for ulterior motives in the name of efficiency.