A vector of attack has emerged from the fray, a vector that has been directed towards people like me, towards citizens who are ringing bells of concern.
Why Don't you want for our government to be more efficient? What's wrong with that?
You see this question is not really a question, it's an insult disguised as a question. The framing basically implies that the choice is binary and that the checkbox I'm coloring implicates me in the corruption of the status quo.
To put it simply, it's an ad-hominen attack deployed to avoid the uncomfortable conversation. The conversation where we sit down and go over the facts available to us.
Facts > Feelings ?
Quick tip of the hat
Zack has been very vocal with his political positions. I started following the man for his intellect, he's basically a nerd deity, but I support him for being brave enough to speak out, even if it's hurting his business model.
No lies detected
Trump and Elon keep on telling us their sole mission with the creating of DOGE, and the assigning of Elon as it's head, is to find waste, fraud and abuse.
In paper it's hard to disagree with such a mission for me, since for as long as I've been a tax payer, I've felt robbed by Uncle Sam and his "priorities".
However, all I see from DOGE, from Elon, is chaos. It's as if the motto is:
"break it, if it's needed we will fix it later".
This motto is common in the tech world, I'm told, and since Elon comes from this ecosystem, it's not surprising he thinks it's the right approach, but there's just a giant problem he's failing to see.
The government is not a business
The idea that government is supposed to be profitable is laughable at best.
Late professor David Graeber in my opinion lifted the veil on this whole "balancing the budget" myth in one of his most important books.
A must read in my opinion if you feel compelled to fully understand this complicated subject.
Some short quotes from the book to hopefully entice you to look up the late professor, and submerge yourself in his mind for a week.
- "Consumer debt is the lifeblood of our economy. All modern nation states are built on deficit spending".
- "The government is hiding the taboo that if it balances its books, it becomes impossible for the private sector to do the same".
- "This inevitable debt often gets landed on those in society least able to pay it back".
Before somebody mistakes the late professor for a leftie soy powered intellectual, may I present to you another one of his quotes from another book I strongly recommend:
“We are usually told that democracy originated in ancient Athens—like science, or philosophy, it was a Greek invention. It’s never entirely clear what this is supposed to mean. Are we supposed to believe that before the Athenians, it never really occurred to anyone, anywhere, to gather all the members of their community in order to make joint decisions in a way that gave everyone equal say?”
― David Graeber, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology
What's actually happening
I realize I won't convince anyone who's wearing a "Team Musk" jersey that he's doing everything for personal benefit, but maybe we can begin with a small step in what I hope is: the right direction.
If the focus was and is to save tax paying citizens money, to eliminate waste, fraud and abuse; Should the current administration then:
Consider not spending so much time golfing, costing the country millions of dollars for each trip and security personnel.
Consider not attending big sporting events, again costing millions of dollars to us tax payers, to just parade around and feed hungry egos.
Not use Air Force 1 to fly over Daytona because "it's cool"
Spending millions renaming geographical locations
Let's operate in honesty
I'm willing to accept when the government does something right, regardless of who's at the helm. Being disconnected from Political parties, or at least not assigning a color to my heart, allows me to take wins when I can get them.
But if we are to have a conversation on this matter, to move the needle even a thousand of an inch, we need to:
- Stick to principles
- Stop moving goal posts
If we can't do these two things, then the conversations we may have will naturally devolve into insults rendering them pointless.
So I leave you with the question I started with, because I would really like the honest answer.
Good book recommendation. I'll have to check it out. As for the question, in my mind, know that I feel the government may not be a business, but operates as one, I would have to say that the efficiency is not going to be applied to the general populace, but rather, to the ones it will benefit most. Hence the name - DOGE.
I think we are witnessing the moving of the goal post. As I see it, they are slashing programs they disagree with.
In other words, they decided: The political process is too cumbersome, so fuck that, let's just do it.
Thousands of years polishing democracy to shit on it overnight.
Not saying I disagree with that, but at the same time, the current democratic process takes entirely too long to get anything done. In that regard, I like they aren't messing around. Though, it does have kind of a tyrannical feel to it.
The real issue isn't democratic inefficiency, but corruption. The longer an institution exists, the longer it's security has been challenged by corruption. The facility with which corruption penetrates institutional hierarchies is built into them, because that is actually their primary purpose. They are vectors for profiteers to fatten on the public purse, first and foremost.
Antisocialist hammers this point constantly, that government arose when first a gang armed up to farm the neighbors instead of the land, and this is the essential fact of government, that it is designed to be the biggest, most powerful gang of thugs on the block, and thus able to depend on fleecing the sheeple, who can in turn expect to be protected from unrestrained taxation from an insuperable variety of gangs that prevent them from conducting commerce by those depredations.
This unrestrained taxation is explicitly revealed to have done exactly this on Hive, as the ~1M users that overcame onboarding and UI learning curve to post on the platform beginning in 2017 have been taxed off the platform, leaving we few thousand survivors of that winnowing. While the egregious bidbotting also contributed, flagging away 100% of users' rewards was the mechanism that prevented token distribution from disturbing the monopoly on governance ~36 whales have continuously maintained, while the Founder's stake didn't participate in governance, and when Hive was created to escape that tyranny when it did after Steemit was acquired by Sun.
We'll see if the Trump administration proves to be different from other political gangs by failing to restore pipelines to purloined property that taxation is to it's oligarchy, but Stargate has already proved to me it is no different from other political gangs. I reckon it will just take time for cultists to accept they've been bamboozled yet again and accept the reality when they can't deny it anymore.
It is the Elon's Starlink constellation that will be supplying the video to Ellison's AI surveillance social credit overlord, so the profiteering of the Trump oligarchy began immediately, the $500B Stargate scheme being announced on the 2nd day of the Trump administration, IIRC. As vile as the DIE racism and propaganda of the previous administration was, I am convinced Stargate will be orders of magnitude worse, with no apparent way to end it presently foreseeable.
Yes, the process is cumbersome and annoying, I won't defend it's efficiency, it's not efficient. But, as with many other things in life, it evolved to be this way.
In parallel, keep this in mind:
I would like to believe that the slow process of progress, if any has actually happened lately, is how we filter out bad ideas from good ones, polish out ok ones, and end up with the closest thing we can to a democratic goal.
Otherwise, as you correctly point out, we end up with authoritarian flavored coffee for breakfast.
Now, the thing is, we do have historical precedence for this type of behavior. It's not like this is the first time we are witnessing it.
This is not to say it's going to play out precisely the same, but we do know that's it's never a good idea to play with fire next to dry leaves.
Man, this whole efficiency argument is just a fancy way of saying let’s cut stuff we don’t like and keep the stuff we do. If government was actually run like a business, half these politicians would’ve been fired ages ago.
They spend millions on stuff that surprises me💔
You are precisely right...
Meno agrees 🔥🔥🔥💪💪💪💪
One of the darkest fears I have is that only the body of the agency is gutted, but the head remains alive.
By which I mean, if we have this:
FBI: The power to investigate anything.
CIA: The power to spy on anyone.
NSA: The power to surveil the internet.
TSA: The power to search and seize anything at a border.
DMV: The power to be boring and tedious and make people wait in line.
IRS: The power to steal money.
If they only take away the employees and structure, but keep the Authority and Power intact, then they now have pocket-sized authority-tickets that let them do the things that the agency once did instead.
And I highly doubt they'll give up their power! They will want MORE power - And will they will drain it from anything they want and keep it for themselves in some/any form?
Furthermore, they can always grow these agencies again - But won't they grow it with only their own people, to deliberately corrupt the government?
you paint a picture worthy of nightmares.... but, it's not unthinkable, not with this administration's ineptness.
Have you read Aristotle's "Politics", he reviews exetant forms of government known to history at the time.
https://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/politics.html
I found Graber's "Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology" and have added it to my reading list.
https://files.libcom.org/files/fragmentsofananarchist.pdf
Posted using Political Hive
thank you for sharing this brother... I'm going to make this a good read for this morning's coffee.
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