gloom

If the Musk-Trump playbook works, what’s left of valuable state capacity in the USG will basically be sold to private equity by 2028. Anything left behind because it can’t be privatized will be tax-revenue starved, with any jobs that remain being filled by industry-captured right-wing staffers. The only meaningful kind of capacity left will be military and police capacity. Ie a night-watchman state.

If you ignore the political theater around DOGE, it’s basically the PE playbook for domestic policy. The exact things you’d do to take a vulnerable company private via hostile takeover. Trade wars as the basis for foreign policy is similarly the PE playbook in international relations. Taking an entire country private.

“Efficiency” as a pure religion has no other purpose than enclosure. What’s going on is the exact opposite of public goods thinking in the sense the Ethereum community values,

Delver at contraptions.venkateshrao.com, running summerofprotocols.com, host of /gloom ☀️

People forget the whole point of democracy is to serve the people.

Treat it like a business and you’ll end up as an employee…not great if you look at the state of employees in the US today.