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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.

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.

> 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.

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.

> think you’re immune from consequences

I’m saying they can get away and get their resources out faster than before, and even before they were mostly fine.

> 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

These are never the beneficiaries in revolution. Ever. That doesn’t stop revolution. Folks say “fuck you” when enough is enough. But again, it’s not rebirth—it’s bowing out of the civilisation game. The “revolutions” we romanticise preserved preëxisting power structures.

To the extent America stands on the precipice of revolution, it’s in the molds of Cæsar and Augustus.

benreesman 573 days ago

> I’m saying they can get away and get their resources out faster than before, and even before they were mostly fine.

A Reaper drone with Hellfire missiles can go just about anywhere that bilateral money laundering legislation and agreements can’t. If Bill Gross or Larry Summers manages to get gold bullion into the DPRK? Yeah, maybe he’s beyond the long arm of the American public.

I’m reticent to even mention this peripherally because it’s a troll magnet but the example is too compelling to pass by. I’m not a native of the region and I don’t feel fit to moralize about it, but I am an avid student of asymmetrical multi-axis warfare with an emphasis on countermeasures to state-sponsored digital surveillance and militarized domestic police forces because the only way the peace will be kept is if the arch-Randian villains back down after a robust force assessment.

Whatever the morality of this or that actor in the region, the strategy and tactics of the IDF and Mossad are basically a masterclass in flipping the ostensible balance of power over with ease and a sneer: and while the details are many people’s life’s work, the terminal game theory node is that they’ll do anything. They will always dramatically overreact with punitive collateral damage and flawless execution and there’s no upper bound. No one bluffs the IDF into accepting a status quo they don’t like over any meaningful period of time.

I’m pretty skeptical that this is a good posture for a nation state armed to the teeth, but again, not my lived experience.

It’s precisely the right posture for oppressed majorities in modern great power settings where none of the elected or appointed or confirmed officials can give Gates a parking ticket if he crashed a Tesla into Gary Gensler and somehow shouted a transphobic slur.

The Black community in America didn’t claw back some semblance of dignity via some condescending hand out: they scrupulously operated within the law until it was clear that the law was exhausted if not adversarial as a recourse and then Malcolm X and the Audubon Ballroom made it very clear that Afghanistan is a cakewalk next to Atlanta if some bargain isn’t struck. From Emmett Teal to LA 92 that community is a shining example of patriotism in both a dramatic preference for abiding the law and not fucking around on soft treatments of tyrants or collaborators when the missile goes up.

Amazon pays OSHA fines because it’s cheaper than obeying the law, there have been fatalities and countless injuries and Genghis Khan seems restrained and enlightened in terms of how those people should be handled if you want a meaningful deterrent. I’d happily settle for prison and call it a compromise. It’s difficult to point to a billion dollar line item on an invoice or a balance sheet anywhere and not see at least one moral felon giving you the finger in fucking Atherton or Los Gatos.

The rich and powerful and sociopathic can do exactly what the public will tolerate before we kill them, and not a Planck length more. They will export assets and shop for tax structures as far as they can before they cease to be a factor.

It astounds, perplexes, depresses, confuses, and enrages me that anyone anywhere would make an argument to egg them on to ever greater heights of brinksmanship with the most dangerous thing in the world: a vast public better armed than credible militaries and facing eviction via a letter from some walking atrocity like whoever does that for The Carlyle Group.

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.

> 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

Sure. They should do more. My point is “watch out, you’ll wind up headless” is more self soothing than a threat. If America flips over, the billionaires will be fine. Maybe a couple unlucky or stupid millionaires will lose their coin or lives. Most will, at worst, preserve their wealth; more likely, they’ll get more wealthy and powerful.

> Jane’s Prop desk and yet still under its boot

Nobody at Jane Street is wealthy enough to be politically relevant outside its founders. (Unless they’re trading from a very small town, and you’re in it.)

I admire your candor and persistence but I think I’m just wired a bit differently.

I agree that the present oligarch class is every bit as powerful in relative terms as any before them. They also have the advantage of modern technology: ubiquitous domestic surveillance and militarized police are clearly not designed to prevent petty crime.

And the last thing I want to see is chaos and bloodshed. But I do want working people to regain some level of bargaining power, and with an elite as insular and vulgar as this one, that probably means a credible threat at least in abstract.

Extreme military power has failed against motivated populations almost without exception in all asymmetrical scenarios this century: it is not a foregone conclusion that oppression lacks an upper bound.

The end state on the current trend lines would be a catastrophic failure of our civilization.

I’m not yet prepared to accept that as inevitable.

> 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.

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.

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

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.