[TrackerFF]

Should be obvious. If you want a smaller government, you'll need to privatize the tasks / services which government agencies used to provide. Venture capital / private equity / etc. owned companies will stand in line to get those contracts.

And with deregulations, "move fast and break things" startups can move even faster.

What puzzles me about the SV venture capital crowd, though, is that they're usually a somewhat socially liberal crowd. They enjoy social freedoms which the current gov. would rather see go away...so, talk about selling their soul to the devil.

[nerdponx]

It often comes down to freedom for me, not freedom for everyone.

[11101010001100]

also known as power.

[jakelazaroff]

> What puzzles me about the SV venture capital crowd, though, is that they're usually a somewhat socially liberal crowd.

SV workers, sure. But "socially liberal" is absolutely not my impression of SV venture capitalists.

[epistasis]

There are quite a few socially liberal VCs, perhaps even most. But there are also more libertarians, which is quite common among those who make fortunes managing money rather than building things.

[apercu]

They cosplay as socially liberal but they want to be free from the responsibilities of belonging to a decent society.

[epistasis]

Privatization of those functions results in the government paying consultants more than they would pay staff, with less institutional knowledge, and far less efficiency than if the functions were directly in the government.

Generally, the government doesn't do things that private industry could do on their own. There are specific times where this isn't true. For example, there were small commuter buses in San Francisco for a while that the existing MUNI service could not accomplish. But these are quite rare!

For example, private industry is never going to fund basic research that is the foundation of the US's wealth and strength, except through taxation. The idea is ludicrous.

We could have private highways, private roads, perhaps, but we would be handing off public decisions to a private company that is almost certainly a monopoly. There are only rare cases where roads and highways are not inherently monopolistic.

SV venture capital is not one type of person, there are both liberal and libertarians among them. The libertarian variety got suckered in by the Dark Enlightenment propaganda and thought they could be the puppetmasters controlling the world with propaganda. They should have looked to what happens to their ilk in places like Russia before backing someone who wants to turn the US into an autocracy like Russia:

https://www.cnn.com/2022/09/02/business/russian-oligarchs-de...

[JumpCrisscross]

> What puzzles me about the SV venture capital crowd, though, is that they're usually a somewhat socially liberal crowd

Silicon Valley has had a monarchist element for at least a decade now. I've been commenting on it for a while. It masked itself in the language of libertarianism. (Note: not all libertarians are monarchists.) But 2024 outed them (Andreessen, Musk, the All In crowd, et cetera) for the bastards that they are.

[lovich]

I mean it was barely masked. They dropped mentions of the dark enlightenment like name dropping Curtis yarvin/mencius moldbug pretty frequently if you listened to their talks.

Sam Harris is the only intellectual in that space that I know of who was repulsed by their actual views and pulled back but maybe there are others.

The libertarian party itself got taken over by a less sophisticated group of these guys in a Mises Caucus mask from a coup orchestrated by the overstock.com ceo in 2022

[ModernMech]

The monarchists bent wasn't masked, but the racism was. I still remember the controversy around Yarvin being removed as a speaker at Strange Loop. A lot of people could not understand why what he said was racist.

[lovich]

I do not think the racism was masked anymore than the monarchist bent. Monarchists are just more palatable than racists.

I have been railing against these people for over a decade.

My experience with every friend or acquaintance denying their racism pretty much came down to “no one is actually that bad, you’re being ridiculous”

Between that and the people telling me Project 2025 was a caricature of a cartoon villain and would never happen last year, I am losing my mind at all the people confiding in me hat in hand that maybe, these people might actually want to bad things

It was really obvious what these people wanted. They advertised it. They wrote entire books about their plan. But all they had to do is say “no, that’s not true” in a single interview and everyone bought it because the alternative was mentally painful

You can have members of this group straight up admit to lying[1] and yet I have people who I can show the video of them admitting to lying who then still try to claim the lie is truthful.

If you are reading this comment and had seen these actions and events and had waved them off previously, then my opinion is that you were actively ignorant to save yourself the mental anguish

[1] https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/jd-vance...

[ModernMech]

I agree they were not masked for people who can see through the masks, but the abstractness of their argument style gave them a level of plausible deniability that you just don't see anymore. For example, whereas before they would express their racism by pointing to literature like "The Bell Curve", now they just say stuff like this: https://www.thenerdreich.com/curtis-yarvins-racist-slurs-hav...

[rektomatic]

>you'll need to privatize the tasks / services which government agencies used to provide

Most of what DOGE cut was stuff no one wanted or needed in the first place. Just scroll their twitter feed, cutting this stuff shouldn't be termed as "smaller government".

[20after4]

If you take their claims at face value then you might believe that, however, if you look into it even just a little you find that they drastically misrepresented what was cut.