I Bought a Vacuum Last Tuesday
I'm going to tell you something embarrassing. I spent forty-five minutes last Tuesday researching robot vacuums. Comparing suction ratings. Reading user reviews. Checking price history on three different apps to make sure I was getting the actual sale price and not a fake markdown.
Forty-five minutes. For a vacuum.
And I did it because it was my money. Because I was going to live with the decision. Because if I bought the wrong one I'd have to look at my bad choice in the corner of my living room every single day.
That's how markets work. Skin in the game produces careful decisions. The woman who is going to run a vacuum across her floors every week has strong incentives to buy a vacuum that actually works. She reads the reviews. She compares the prices. She thinks about the warranty.
Now Consider Congress
The federal government spent $6.75 trillion in fiscal year 2025. Not one member of Congress who voted for that budget has to live with a single bad line item the way I have to live with a bad vacuum purchase. If the $400 million contract for a software system that doesn't work produces nothing, nobody gets fired. Nobody loses their pension. Nobody has to look at their mistake in the corner of the room every day.
The incentives are completely inverted. In the private market, the person making the spending decision bears the cost of a bad decision. In government, the person making the spending decision often benefits from a bad decision — more spending means more staff, more power, more budget authority next cycle. The program that doesn't work gets reformed, which means expanded, which means more money.
My grandmother — a farm woman from western Texas who raised six children on a budget tighter than most people can imagine — had a phrase for this: "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, I'm buying something else." She would not have survived twenty years in a government agency.
Spring Cleaning as Philosophy
There's something genuinely clarifying about spring cleaning. You go through everything. You ask: does this work? Does this serve a purpose? Would I buy this again knowing what I know now? If the answer is no, it goes out.
We do this with our homes every year. We have never done it with the federal government. Not once. Not seriously.
DOGE has made some noise about this. I'm rooting for it. But the structural problem isn't a few billion in obvious waste — it's the incentive architecture that produces waste systematically and rewards the people producing it. Fix the incentive structure and the waste goes down. Leave the incentive structure in place and you can cut all you want — it'll grow back like weeds in April.
The Amazon sale on vacuums is a tiny miracle of market function: millions of people, each spending their own money, each bearing the consequences of their choice, collectively producing a signal that tells manufacturers what to build and retailers what to stock. It's spontaneous order. It works because the costs and benefits are aligned with the decision-makers.
Washington is the opposite of that. Costs fall on taxpayers who have no meaningful vote on individual line items. Benefits accrue to contractors and agencies and congressional districts. The misalignment is total and structural and has produced the most expensive, least accountable government in American history.
I found a good vacuum. Fifty percent off, excellent reviews, ships free. Small victories.
