There is nothing new about dehumanizing efficiency jargon. Efficiency was an argument for American slavery in the nineteenth century and for Nazi and Soviet concentration camps in the twentieth. Julius Margolin, in his memoir of five years in the Gulag, defined it as a place where no one could ask why? “Here there is no why,” said an Auschwitz camp guard to Primo Levi. In the Warsaw Ghetto, Jews labored until the food they consumed was regarded as more valuable than the labor that could be extracted from them. Then they were sent to Treblinka to be gassed. The clearing of the ghetto was timed
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