Comment on Hedge fund billionaire says US may face ‘worse than a recession’ from Trump tariffs
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 1 week agoThe Network State: How to Startup a Country
It’s so much more ambitious than that. They explicitly want Balkanization and formalized oligarchy along the Singapore/S. Korea/Hong Kong/Philippines model.
conditional_soup@lemm.ee 1 week ago
They want balkanization? I want Balkanization because I think it would break the federal government’s kneecaps (making it harder for corporates and fascists to leverage) and finally let Texas and Florida stop dragging everyone else down. I’m now automatically more suspicious of my own position.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Yes. That’s a lot of what the “Freedom Cities” push is about. Create a network of autonomous enclaves where a single billionaire or board room effectively operates as a tyrant. Govern everything through permissions-based digital infrastructure (id badges to enter and leave any building or use any transit service, credit scores determined by years of service and employer approval rating, all property rented from the local oligarch, all residents are just at-will employees). It’s a pure technocratic Company Town model.
Part of the insanity of it all is in how guys like Musk and Theil and Zuckerburg and Bezos don’t see any inherent value in a public federal system. They consider federalism an impediment to their vision of techno-feudalism and they see the money that the federal government uses to staff and support itself as resources wasted on a bureaucracy better managed by the private sector.
They are Anarcho-Capitalists in the most literal sense.