Rube Goldberg, the Sun’s most famous cartoonist, has been kidnapped by the New York Times this morning in service of explaining the Federal Reserve. It’s produced a wonderful video. But it fails to catch the full absurdity of the contraption that serves as our central bank. A sense of the absurd, after all, was the central element of Goldberg’s machines, like the “self-operating napkin.” So how might Reuben Goldberg have actually tried to capture the Fed’s creation of currency?

We can imagine his famous “Professor Butts” looking in a jewelry shop window at a ring for his wife. Reaching for his wallet, he discovers that it’s empty. But it has a string attached to it which releases a latch on a hive of bumble bees one of which bites a Donkey who starts running on a treadmill that powers a shredder which cuts up the Constitution into shreds that tumble near a lit candle which ignites the shreds which inflates a balloon which turns on a printing press which turns out Federal Reserve Notes . . .

. . . Which tumble into a large funnel which feeds into Butts’ wallet, which expands to release a catch that sets off a spring that flips the price-card off the ring in the jewelry story window, triggering another tag with double the price to fall into its place, which startles the Professor’s dog, which pulls on its leash, which topples a bottle of Acme Fainting Powder that spills into the soup that Paul Krugman is eating, which causes him to faint, which takes the pressure off the Fed to inflate, which eventually causes Mrs. Butts to . . .

Well, let us just say it’s not hard to imagine Rube having a field day with the current situation. But our guess is that he’d come to the point he came to with his famous effort to design a perpetual motion machine. It was immortalized in a film for Chevrolet. By the end of it, a bedraggled Rube Goldberg, standing before a heap of crumpled designs, announces he’s done it. That turns out to be a machine powered by Niagara Falls, which seems to run perpetually until the machine itself wears out. Which could yet be the fate of the Fed.