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Some have said that the folks running DOGE follow an Anarcho-capitalist philosophy. According to Wikipedia, that philosophy "seeks to abolish centralized state

Some have said that the folks running DOGE follow an Anarcho-capitalist philosophy. According to Wikipedia, that philosophy "seeks to abolish centralized states in favor of stateless societies with systems of private property enforced by private agencies." If so, I don't think they care if it's a "good" program or a "bad" program, they just want to reduce the size of government. Some might say, they are throwing the baby out with the bathwater, but their goal might be to throw out the baby, bathwater and the tub.

analog31 2y ago
Afghanistan has that. Instead of landlords, they have warlords, just a different term for the same thing. Why is anybody interested in repeating that thing? I've been told that billionaires think differently than the rest of us, but I still can't fathom why someone would want to be the king of a shit hole when they could be richer as a regular citizen of a liberal democracy. Why do they hate our success?
- lesuorac 2y ago
  Is life really that much better for billionaires of today than kings of last millennium? Sure you can acquire a private fleet of jets and cars now. But given that you rarely if-ever drive them it's no different than a fleet of rare animals. Sure you can play video games and watch sports on TV but is that really much better than watching sports from a private suite? I will conceded that their life expectancy has basically doubled but I don't think there's anything you can do as a king to fix that. If you don't hoard all the wealth it's not like life expectancy immediately doubles. A rising tide raises all ships but the tide takes centuries to do that lifting.
  - _DeadFred_ 2y ago
    In fact things are worse for them today. In Versai it was the norm for the king to take a dump in a bucket in front of the whole court. Today's billionaires have to pay people to watch them do it and have to keep it hush hush.
    - drivingmenuts 2y ago
      Then they're idiots, because in today's society, it's not difficult to find someone who will absolutely enjoy watching you take a dump. The problem is finding someone who's not going to enjoy it so much it becomes uncomfortable.
      - maxerickson 2y ago
        The comparison breaks down on the other side also. It's not like the average court was just in thrall to the king, much of what they did was for access to wealth and power.
  - drivingmenuts 2y ago
    They generally don't have to be as paranoid about people trying to kill them, for one - sure, some wacko might jump a fence once in a while, but any halfway decent security arrangement takes care of that. And no one has to worry that some other billionaire is going to send an army to conquer his or her estate and holdings by force of arms, slaughtering all the employees and destroying the inventory. They don't have to pack the basements with food for the winter. Their fleets of cars and other ridiculous collections can be safely stored away from the environment and peasants (meaning anyone poor, like millionaires). Governments make rules to favor them and do the job of selling it to the masses. They don't have to do their own PR. In fact, the media will do the PR for them and it won't cost them anything, for the most part. They can bury their pecadillos on private islands, secure in the knowledge that, even if word gets out, word won't get out, for reasons. And besides, no one will really care, because governments and media will magically turn it from horrible scandal to mild eccentricity. And if they don't like the government, well, now, they can just buy one. No idea what happens if they try to return it, though.
  - bumby 2y ago
    Psychologically, “better” is not referenced to the objective things they have, but the relative things they have. So humans drawn to status-driven wealth will always want more relative wealth.
- EndShell 2y ago
  I would suggest you read “Anatomy of the State” by Murray Rothbard. I don’t want to sound rude but your comment is what people say when they haven’t read anything about it. I used to make similar arguments like was at the top of your comment until I actually read some literature around it.
  - analog31 2y ago
    Which state is it about? Can't I just read history, and the news?
    - EndShell 2y ago
      The pdf version of the book is free. You can read find out yourself :) https://cdn.mises.org/Anatomy%20of%20the%20State_3.pdf https://cdn.mises.org/Anatomy%20of%20the%20State_3.pdf
- hakfoo 2y ago
  The argument I could see is that even the least king has certain privileges that no tycoon in a democratic state offers. The obvious example I could see is just the concept of legal immunity. There's no need to deluge your critics with lawyers when the courts will simply refuse to take up objections to His Majesty. It would also presumably make an excellent "flag of convenience" for your other wealth assets- create a legal framework to formally avoid taxes and liability. Of course, I always assumed it would be cheaper to buy a regime change in some small nation of limited economic import than to wrangle a nuclear superpower, so what do I know. If I woke up with Elon Musk's pocketbook, given I spent way too much of my childhood playing SimCity and Civilization, I'd want to experiment with some ideas on statecraft myself. Mine run to more "WWII-style ration books as a UBI distribution medium", "we're banning cars and building so much rail that people will regularly have their arms amputated by sticking them out their apartment window and hitting a passing train" and "ripping the Berne Convention to shreds and wiping with it on livestream", but clearly YMMV.
  - drivingmenuts 2y ago
    That system only works so long as you are prepared to be completely self-reliant, which is fine for a largely agrarian society. But at some point, technological complexity requires continued reliance on outside groups or you don't progress or even maintain. Consider a scenario - the US falls into some weird anarcho-libertarian dystopia. This works fine for a while, but no one is making new computers or new cars or new anything and the only way to get these things is to open negotiations with outside groups. But what do you offer them? The currency is worthless because it used to be backed by a central government but it isn't now. If you don't have something that is valued by the outside group, you have nothing to bargain with. And if you don't have superior force of arms, they don't have to accept it anyway. And even if you do, you absolutely cannot trust them. Modern government is built on trust. It has value because, even if it is somewhat corrupt, or even totally corrupt, it keeps society functioning in a way that provides value to everyone, even if it is unevenly distributed. By reducing that uneven distribution, we increase the overall value to everyone both inside and outside the system. It's literally the definition of win-win. If the government system has some value, then its currency has value, regardless. The US dollar is valued because it is backed by the word of the US government. Other countries have lesser value because, while their word might be good, they aren't as trusted or don't have the might that the US government has at its command. Trump and Musk and the people they're working with don't get that. They only see win-lose. They don't understand that their value is in trust and that they are rapidly pissing away that trust. We are unimaginably fucked. Maybe I'm preaching to the choir, and badly at that, and I apologize for that. I'm sitting down here, so far from being able to do anything effective, and it's so unbelievably frustrating.
- SantalBlush 2y ago
  Billionaires are transnational; they can live wherever they want. The only thing tying them to a particular country is that country's restrictions on their capital flows. They don't really care if it's a liberal democracy or not, they just want the lowest taxes and free movement of capital. If an area becomes undesirable to live in, they'll move somewhere else.
  - analog31 2y ago
    But there needs to be a somewhere else, i.e., they still depend on the liberal democracies for any quality of life above bare subsistence. While they point the finger at those democracies for being decadent and corrupt. They needed to maintain the claim that democracy should be destroyed, in order to prop up their ideologies, without actually going ahead and destroying it. Oops.
- throwaway173738 2y ago
  People want warlords because they think they’ll come out on top. That’s why there’s a big overlap between the big national militia groups and MAGA trumpers. They style themselves warlords and want the government to get out of the way so they can form their own government.
EasyMark 2y ago
The DOGE members are tech bros who are into classic Randian libertarianism,small government that only protects money and property, and all other "public services" would be provided by private markets. They want to make government look weak and impotent so that people like Musk, Bezos, the Waltons, etc can provide those services at a premium or "fuck you". it's a downward spiral that concentrates wealth in the hands of the wealthy and creates a permanent class of serfs and slaves. Until they figure out that won't work here when the masses have had enough and communism starts looking pretty good when you and your children and freezing and starving and you have a basement full of guns and ammo that you can't eat.
- bumby 2y ago
  Michael Lewis paints a different picture in his book “The Fifth Risk” where govt infrastructure is leveraged for private profits. Ex: AccuWeather uses NOAA data to make their products while lobbying to make the same NOAA data inaccessible to others.
- EndShell 2y ago
  Most of the people that seem to be influential seem to be either Paleo-cons, Rothbardians and people that are believers in the Austrian School of Economics. I am not an ancap because there are some major problems with their philosophy, but your analysis is just incorrect.
bumby 2y ago
If true, there’s some irony in how much of the actions are centrally planned rather than pushed down to lower level leaders closer to the problems.

analog31 2y ago

Afghanistan has that. Instead of landlords, they have warlords, just a different term for the same thing. Why is anybody interested in repeating that thing? I've been told that billionaires think differently than the rest of us, but I still can't fathom why someone would want to be the king of a shit hole when they could be richer as a regular citizen of a liberal democracy. Why do they hate our success?

lesuorac 2y ago
Is life really that much better for billionaires of today than kings of last millennium? Sure you can acquire a private fleet of jets and cars now. But given that you rarely if-ever drive them it's no different than a fleet of rare animals. Sure you can play video games and watch sports on TV but is that really much better than watching sports from a private suite? I will conceded that their life expectancy has basically doubled but I don't think there's anything you can do as a king to fix that. If you don't hoard all the wealth it's not like life expectancy immediately doubles. A rising tide raises all ships but the tide takes centuries to do that lifting.
- _DeadFred_ 2y ago
  In fact things are worse for them today. In Versai it was the norm for the king to take a dump in a bucket in front of the whole court. Today's billionaires have to pay people to watch them do it and have to keep it hush hush.
  - drivingmenuts 2y ago
    Then they're idiots, because in today's society, it's not difficult to find someone who will absolutely enjoy watching you take a dump. The problem is finding someone who's not going to enjoy it so much it becomes uncomfortable.
    - maxerickson 2y ago
      The comparison breaks down on the other side also. It's not like the average court was just in thrall to the king, much of what they did was for access to wealth and power.
- drivingmenuts 2y ago
  They generally don't have to be as paranoid about people trying to kill them, for one - sure, some wacko might jump a fence once in a while, but any halfway decent security arrangement takes care of that. And no one has to worry that some other billionaire is going to send an army to conquer his or her estate and holdings by force of arms, slaughtering all the employees and destroying the inventory. They don't have to pack the basements with food for the winter. Their fleets of cars and other ridiculous collections can be safely stored away from the environment and peasants (meaning anyone poor, like millionaires). Governments make rules to favor them and do the job of selling it to the masses. They don't have to do their own PR. In fact, the media will do the PR for them and it won't cost them anything, for the most part. They can bury their pecadillos on private islands, secure in the knowledge that, even if word gets out, word won't get out, for reasons. And besides, no one will really care, because governments and media will magically turn it from horrible scandal to mild eccentricity. And if they don't like the government, well, now, they can just buy one. No idea what happens if they try to return it, though.
- bumby 2y ago
  Psychologically, “better” is not referenced to the objective things they have, but the relative things they have. So humans drawn to status-driven wealth will always want more relative wealth.
EndShell 2y ago
I would suggest you read “Anatomy of the State” by Murray Rothbard. I don’t want to sound rude but your comment is what people say when they haven’t read anything about it. I used to make similar arguments like was at the top of your comment until I actually read some literature around it.
- analog31 2y ago
  Which state is it about? Can't I just read history, and the news?
  - EndShell 2y ago
    The pdf version of the book is free. You can read find out yourself :) https://cdn.mises.org/Anatomy%20of%20the%20State_3.pdf https://cdn.mises.org/Anatomy%20of%20the%20State_3.pdf
hakfoo 2y ago
The argument I could see is that even the least king has certain privileges that no tycoon in a democratic state offers. The obvious example I could see is just the concept of legal immunity. There's no need to deluge your critics with lawyers when the courts will simply refuse to take up objections to His Majesty. It would also presumably make an excellent "flag of convenience" for your other wealth assets- create a legal framework to formally avoid taxes and liability. Of course, I always assumed it would be cheaper to buy a regime change in some small nation of limited economic import than to wrangle a nuclear superpower, so what do I know. If I woke up with Elon Musk's pocketbook, given I spent way too much of my childhood playing SimCity and Civilization, I'd want to experiment with some ideas on statecraft myself. Mine run to more "WWII-style ration books as a UBI distribution medium", "we're banning cars and building so much rail that people will regularly have their arms amputated by sticking them out their apartment window and hitting a passing train" and "ripping the Berne Convention to shreds and wiping with it on livestream", but clearly YMMV.
- drivingmenuts 2y ago
  That system only works so long as you are prepared to be completely self-reliant, which is fine for a largely agrarian society. But at some point, technological complexity requires continued reliance on outside groups or you don't progress or even maintain. Consider a scenario - the US falls into some weird anarcho-libertarian dystopia. This works fine for a while, but no one is making new computers or new cars or new anything and the only way to get these things is to open negotiations with outside groups. But what do you offer them? The currency is worthless because it used to be backed by a central government but it isn't now. If you don't have something that is valued by the outside group, you have nothing to bargain with. And if you don't have superior force of arms, they don't have to accept it anyway. And even if you do, you absolutely cannot trust them. Modern government is built on trust. It has value because, even if it is somewhat corrupt, or even totally corrupt, it keeps society functioning in a way that provides value to everyone, even if it is unevenly distributed. By reducing that uneven distribution, we increase the overall value to everyone both inside and outside the system. It's literally the definition of win-win. If the government system has some value, then its currency has value, regardless. The US dollar is valued because it is backed by the word of the US government. Other countries have lesser value because, while their word might be good, they aren't as trusted or don't have the might that the US government has at its command. Trump and Musk and the people they're working with don't get that. They only see win-lose. They don't understand that their value is in trust and that they are rapidly pissing away that trust. We are unimaginably fucked. Maybe I'm preaching to the choir, and badly at that, and I apologize for that. I'm sitting down here, so far from being able to do anything effective, and it's so unbelievably frustrating.
SantalBlush 2y ago
Billionaires are transnational; they can live wherever they want. The only thing tying them to a particular country is that country's restrictions on their capital flows. They don't really care if it's a liberal democracy or not, they just want the lowest taxes and free movement of capital. If an area becomes undesirable to live in, they'll move somewhere else.
- analog31 2y ago
  But there needs to be a somewhere else, i.e., they still depend on the liberal democracies for any quality of life above bare subsistence. While they point the finger at those democracies for being decadent and corrupt. They needed to maintain the claim that democracy should be destroyed, in order to prop up their ideologies, without actually going ahead and destroying it. Oops.
throwaway173738 2y ago
People want warlords because they think they’ll come out on top. That’s why there’s a big overlap between the big national militia groups and MAGA trumpers. They style themselves warlords and want the government to get out of the way so they can form their own government.

EasyMark 2y ago

The DOGE members are tech bros who are into classic Randian libertarianism,small government that only protects money and property, and all other "public services" would be provided by private markets. They want to make government look weak and impotent so that people like Musk, Bezos, the Waltons, etc can provide those services at a premium or "fuck you". it's a downward spiral that concentrates wealth in the hands of the wealthy and creates a permanent class of serfs and slaves. Until they figure out that won't work here when the masses have had enough and communism starts looking pretty good when you and your children and freezing and starving and you have a basement full of guns and ammo that you can't eat.

bumby 2y ago
Michael Lewis paints a different picture in his book “The Fifth Risk” where govt infrastructure is leveraged for private profits. Ex: AccuWeather uses NOAA data to make their products while lobbying to make the same NOAA data inaccessible to others.
EndShell 2y ago
Most of the people that seem to be influential seem to be either Paleo-cons, Rothbardians and people that are believers in the Austrian School of Economics. I am not an ancap because there are some major problems with their philosophy, but your analysis is just incorrect.

bumby 2y ago

If true, there’s some irony in how much of the actions are centrally planned rather than pushed down to lower level leaders closer to the problems.