The nine most terrifying words in the English language are “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help. Ronald Reagan

Remove the first five words from President Reagan’s quip and you’ve got something worth noting. It makes sense to be suspicious of anyone who claims “I’m here to help.” Anyone who offers to solve all your problems might have an agenda that conflicts with your best interests, so take the offer with a grain of salt. However, there is no need to be a cynic defined by Oscar Wilde as someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. There is no reason to disparage government and give everything else a pass. Americans have been conditioned to do so by the oligarchs who’ve misread Adam Smith. Remember the warning from the “father of economics”:

People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. Adam Smith, An Inquiry Into The Nature And Causes Of The Wealth Of Nations

To paraphrase Pogo: we have met the enemy and he is us, not Uncle Sam. Those who believe in wise and efficient governing are confronted today by a powerful movement to make government irrelevant. Under the guise of removing “fraud and waste”  the leaders of this movement are taking a chainsaw approach that won’t work but will cause (already is causing) a load of pain. Listen, for example, to conservative commentator George Will’s words in the Washington Post:

Trump is the taunter of Canada, coveter of Greenland, threatener of Panama, re-namer of the Gulf of Mexico, scourge of paper straws and demander that Major League Baseball ‘get off its fat, lazy a—’ and enshrine Pete Rose in Cooperstown. He fulminates about everything.” [but] “The in-your-face-all-the-time trophy goes, however, to Trump’s apprentice. The black-clad, chainsaw-wielding Elon Musk is a master of the angry adolescent’s dress and of the now-presidential penchant for vulgarity. ‘LITERALLY, F— YOUR OWN FACE!’ Musk responded with a meme to an X user.

If the remaining 46 months … resemble the first two, this administration will have a remarkably high ratio of theatrical action to substantial achievement … In this fiscal year’s first five months, beginning October 1, the government borrowed $1.1 trillion — almost $8 billion a day.

Don’t take my word that a train wreck is coming. The brilliant Michael Lewis recently published a new book Who Is Government: The Untold Story Of Public Service (a timely follow-up to The Fifth Risk) which documents why government is not only important but essential for all of us and highlights the dedication of most government employees. Here are a few quotes from a recent interview with Lewis:

The government does not attract self-promotional types. Politics does, but government attracts people who sort of keep their heads down.

Elon Musk had no idea what was going on inside the government in any particular way. He had a general attitude. He had sort of the bigotry that the population shares, that it’s always fraud and abuse.

it’s some combination of ideologically wed to the idea that it’s all the private sector, and the public sector is a waste, which is a weird thing for him to be wed to because Tesla doesn’t exist without government loans. The government is all over his businesses and responsible in part for their success.

For Donald Trump, the end game is ‘I just get to be president for as long as I want to be president.’ And we don’t have real elections. The trick to understanding Trump is that everything he accuses other people of, he is guilty of. And so when he says they’re rigging elections, that’s what he wants to do. So yes, I think that it’s that kind of existential threat.

The newest “I’m here to help” refrain is something called the Mar-A-Lago-Accord, something you may not have heard about that could upend your financial security. This is what Forbes has to say about it:

Trying to force other countries to take such a deal would be a dangerous move, showing weakness and undermining confidence in the U.S. That could result in demand for higher interest rates to compensate for greater perceived risk. Another potential issue would be undermining the stance of the U.S. dollar as the world’s leading reserve currency.

The move toward a weaker dollar would mean imports would cost more. Companies would pass along at least some if not all of those expenses to customers, pushing up prices and increasing the risk of growing inflation.

The usually reserved economist Adam Tooze has what might be the best ever description of not only the MAL Accord but of the entire Trump circus.

On this reading, the plans for a Mar-a-Lago Accord relate to normal economic policy in the same way that the grotesque facelifts and boob jobs that are de rigueur at Trump’s resort relate to beauty. The unapologetic “in your face” aspect of the violent surgical intervention, is the point. Btw: On facelifts and the politics of Mar-a-Lago this piece by Inae Oh at Mother Jones is fantastic.

So, when you hear those terrifying words coming from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue run north or south as fast as you can: Heads Canada, Tails Mexico.