The New York Times reports that President Trump's insistence on accelerating delivery of a new Air Force One — a decision driven, by all appearances, more by the desire for a visible trophy than by any operational necessity — has produced exactly the outcome a student of public expenditure would predict: costs have ballooned, and safety features have been traded away in the rush. I offer no opinion on the aeronautical engineering, which lies far beyond my competence. But the institutional logic is entirely familiar to me.

In the Wealth of Nations I observed that the great source of waste in sovereign expenditure is the absence of the discipline that private expenditure must face. The private merchant who overpays for a rushed delivery does so with his own capital, and the loss educates him. The minister who overpays does so with the public's capital, and the loss is distributed so thinly across the whole of society that no single person feels it sharply enough to complain with force. The incentive to care is simply absent.

The problem is compounded when the timeline of a political administration — four years, with an election always in view — is shorter than the timeline of a major capital project. Good procurement is slow, deliberate, and full of tedious inspection. Political procurement is fast, ceremonial, and full of waivers. The New York Times investigation suggests the latter prevailed here. I mark what follows as inference from the lead, not recollection: where safety features are described as having been traded away, one may reasonably ask whether the contractors who agreed to those trade-offs bore any of the resulting risk, or whether the risk was silently transferred to the crews and passengers who will one day fly the machine.

This is the central institutional question I always return to: who bears the cost of a decision? The division of labour that makes complex manufacture possible also makes it possible for responsibility to be divided until it disappears entirely. The airframe manufacturer, the avionics subcontractor, the programme manager, the political aide who set the deadline — each can point to the others. Meanwhile, the taxpayer, who is the true principal in any public procurement, has no seat at the table and often no knowledge that the table exists until an investigation brings it to light.

The remedy is not to forbid the sovereign from having an aircraft, any more than I would forbid the maintenance of roads or courts. These are legitimate public goods. The remedy is transparency and accountability in the contracting process: competitive bidding, independent cost estimation, legislative oversight, and — most importantly — a rule that savings from any acceleration come from the schedule's political sponsor, not from the safety margin. An impartial spectator, that figure I described in the Theory of Moral Sentiments as the proper judge of conduct, would find it difficult to approve an arrangement in which the person who demanded the shortcut bears none of its consequences. Good institutions exist precisely to close that gap between the decision-maker and the cost-bearer. When they fail to do so, we should not be surprised that the costs grow large.