[JumpCrisscross]

> These days? That “blood boy” transfusion thing Thiel is always on about?

This complaint is old as civilisation. Cato complained about the price of pickled fish exceeding that of ploughmen, and that was hundreds of years before even the Republic peaked.

> punitive taxes on the mega wealthy wouldn’t raise enough revenue to matter

Who said this?

I’m a fan of higher (not necessarily punitive) taxes on billionaires. But you can’t trade that for middle-class income taxes 1:1; the former is far more volatile.

[benreesman]

I’ve read Cato as well as undergraduate behavioral economics.

No tax on the wealthy is worth its weight in paper unless it breaks the back of fluid fungibility of money into policy. We have any number of ways to raise revenue, most of which would be trivial if Bezos cast one ballot like anyone else.

Directly or indirectly bribing legislators or regulators should be a capital offense.

[JumpCrisscross]

> No tax on the wealthy is worth its weight in paper unless it breaks the back of fluid fungibility of money into policy

These are separate policy fronts. You've got a water leak in your engine and are trying to solve it by banning rain.

> Directly or indirectly bribing legislators or regulators should be a capital offense

Define this as loosely as Redditors consider lobbying and you essentially shut down democractic involvement to all but those who can afford the trip to D.C. to advocate in person. Or, to Cato, the Tribal Assembly. Bet you'd get a lot of rich people on board with that rule!

[benreesman]

We’ve all been having some version of this conversation for decades: any time someone proposes limiting campaign finance or any other mechanism by which wealth becomes law some unfounded assertion gets made about how it will have unintended consequences that actually favor the people with the money.

“Trust me, I’ll get you over the barrel even more easily if you try to stop me. Shhh, just let it happen.”

I think it’s a bluff.

[benreesman]

In the sunset of dissolution everything takes on the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.

Society worked just fine without IO/PO striping, it worked just fine without K Street as an institution.

I don’t make this case because I take any joy in what will happen to Marie Antoinette. It’s my aim to persuade the investor class to cut a deal before it gets ugly.

[JumpCrisscross]

> Society worked just fine without IO/PO striping, it worked just fine without K Street as an institution

It worked fine without anyone in tech, too. Or crypto.

Agree on K Street. But Trump's 2024 campaign is praxis in disintermediating K Street. We need more precision.

> I don’t make this case because I take any joy in what will happen to Marie Antoinette. It’s my aim to persuade the investor class to cut a deal before it gets ugly

This strikes me as idealistic, maybe arrogant. Marie Antoinette didn't have a private jet or wireable funds.

Even then, most of France's aristocracy fled and lived fine. Violent revolution is not a romantic reset. It's a civilisation bowing out of the competition. They only fester now, post Industrial Revolution, because it's no longer profitable to invade unstable neighbours. The July Revolution, for example, was checked by the threat of foreign intervention. Hell, the "Westphalian" sovereignty Putin talks about was actually a contract permitting the great powers to invade the HRE to guarantee its Constitution.

[benreesman]

Arrogant? You guys think you’re immune from consequences. You think everyone smart and relentless enough to represent any challenge is either already bought or easily sidelined.

There are more of us than you think who walked straight out no education and no connections and trivially operated at comparable levels to privileged and credentialed peers.

But the values are different: when you combine a street kid’s skepticism of our magistrates and noblemen with the first hand experience of seeing how utterly bankrupt the whole artifice is you get implacable enemies with extreme tolerance for adversity who play for keeps in a way no one can who ever benefitted from the system.

Underestimate us all you like.

[benreesman]

I didn’t mean that I was personally going to broker some compromise.

I meant that in my small way I’m part of a larger conversation.

There are a lot of people bright enough to have been at the top of their field who for one reason or another are opposed to the status quo.

I’m just one of a lot of people who are every bit as sophisticated as anyone on Jane’s Prop desk and yet still under its boot.

[JumpCrisscross]

> any time someone proposes limiting campaign finance or any other mechanism by which wealth becomes law some unfounded assertion gets made about how it will have unintended consequences

Saying "directly or indirectly bribing" encompasses all democratic interaction. I indirectly bribe my electeds with votes when they do what I want. You need to be more precise than that language to make a point.

More pointedly, your issue is with money in politics. Not bribery, which is already illegal. Not paid lobbying, I don't think, unless we should outlaw the EFF. Not rich people per se, most of whom have the sense to shut the fuck up.

[benreesman]

I appreciate that the phrasing “directly or indirectly” is a far cry from a reasonable draft of a bill.

The Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act was better thought out by a long way. I was being informal given this is HN.

We all know the moments in time when the public got knee-capped: Brooksley Born was highly on task preventing 2008 via her completely legitimate powers via the CFTC before Summers and Greenspan popped a cap in her ass.

The same is about to happen to Gary Gensler and worse Lina Khan.

This capture is a wratchet until it isn’t. And the Robespierre interlude is something we all hope to avoid.

You sir are clearly educated and astute and traveled, a cut above by far the typical HN apologist for contemporary Friedman shit.

If even you are willing to argue to the bitter end then I’m very sad about how brutal things will soon become.

[benreesman]

This is the status quo. The fifth unit in Thiel’s Stanford startup lectures was titled “Competition is for losers”.

There’s a reason these assholes are building compounds in rural New Zealand.

https://youtu.be/zI7hbEuopLI?si=iyZwEcScazFmMJzZ