Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by phtrivier | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

phtrivier

The core tenet of Muskism, as described at length in Isaacson's bio is around those lines:

* question all the rules

* when in doubt, slash the rule, and see what happens

* if it's really bad without it, bring back the rule

* if you don't have to bring back 10% of the rules that you slashed, you haven't slashed enough yet

USA is now entering the phase where everything is getting slashed - following the will of the majority of -Pennsylvania- the people.

At the level of a company, this can bring great efficiencies, and make reusable self-driving cancer-free nuclear-fusion based rockets. Or crypto scams.

Unfortunately, at the level of a Federal Government, it will bring lower taxes, but some of the 10% will end with coffins. And crypto scams.

We'll watch from the other side of the Atlantic how the great libertarianism experiment goes for the USA.

I expect both impressive improvements, and dramatic karmic irony.

View on HN

> At the level of a company, this can bring great efficiencies, and make reusable self-driving cancer-free nuclear-fusion based rockets. Or crypto scams.

This is questionable. There are many times when bureaucracy exists for bureaucracy sake. But many, many times they exist for a reason.

Get any sufficiently large company and try to understand its complexity. Simply slashing it is a recipe for disaster.

> Unfortunately, at the level of a Federal Government, it will bring lower taxes, but some of the 10% will end with coffins. And crypto scams.

This is highly questionable, especially the "lower taxes" part. Governments are not very keen on reducing revenue, more likely they will only direct the surplus by cutting off services to other things - in the case of US, I wouldn't be surprised if they just increase spending in military, for example. Those sleasy and juicy defence contracts need funding, you know.

There is essentially no relation to taxes. Everything they are cutting falls into the “Other” category in this chart:

https://www.crews.bank/charts/taxes-and-spending

Even if they cut 100% of government functions other than entitlements, healthcare, and defense, it would not solve the deficit.

Is DHS "other", or "defense"?

Regardless, I think the primary costs created by regulation aren't directly to the government budget, but rather knock-on effects of compliance incurred by the entire nation's economy.

DHS would fall under “other”.

At least officially, the stated goal is to eliminate the deficit, which at least Elon has been warning about lately.

If that holds up (and who knows if it will) I wouldn’t expect any taxes to be cut until the budget is close to balanced.

I wonder if I would be happier if I was as naive as a this.

Maybe, but it’s not like it hasn’t happened before… Clinton (yes, a democrat!) campaigned on balancing the budget, and iirc it actually was for a few years. In his case I don’t think taxes changed much either direction.

Oh I was talking specifically about tax cuts because of a more efficient government.

Budgets can be balanced, of course. In some contexts it may be harder to do.

Clinton made tax increase in 1993 with 39.3% top tax rate. It was a big part of the budget balancing that resulted in surplus.

I expect a lot of noise about it, then an expansion of the deficit for tax cuts, followed by more noise about how evil the deficit is.

If we look historically since Nixon, Biden had the smallest deficit growth of 17%. Trump had 34%.

https://www.investopedia.com/us-debt-by-president-dollar-and...

Republicans do not bring up deficit when they are in power.

Interesting… I had looked here: https://www.thebalancemoney.com/us-deficit-by-year-3306306

(quick google search, first result)

Which seems to show a different story. But looks like there is a lot of analysis on the numbers which can be done? (Eg I saw something in your article about ‘Biden will contribute 1.9T to the debt by 2031’.. even if he hadn’t gotten reelected, he wouldn’t be in office in 2031, so this includes the long-term effects of policies?)

On the contrary. Republicans universally "bring up" the deficit when in power. They only ever talk about it during Democratic administrations though.

Many republican candidates talked about deficit, including Trump. Then in power introduced budget cuts.

So the opposite of conservatism in the traditional sense which is do not change things?

Maybe more like radical libertarianism?

More like basic authoritarianism.

I think authoritarianism would be adding rules and bureaucrats, not cutting them.

By cutting, they're centralizing authority at the top. More and different rules will come - some written, many not - but not by the people that were in place before the change.

Not really. Authoritarianism is more about centralization of power and getting rid of layers that could interfere with the central authority's ability to project power.

Lots of rules tend to constrain an authoritarian ruler's ability to act at whim.

No, bureaucratic authoritarianism (our current system) does not encompass all authoritarianism. The flavor that has just been set into motion is autocratic authoritarianism, which is actually closer to what most people mean when they just say "authoritarianism" (hence this gutting of bureaucratic that would otherwise slow it down). That perspectives have been able to become so warped as to blissfully ignore the horrors of autocratic authoritarianism really just shows how out of touch voters have become.

> following the will of the majority of -Pennsylvania- the people.

Or more specifically, the Amish...almost poetic.

Kidding aside, and sorry if it sounds silly, but... do Amish people usually vote a lot ?

Not that I know of, but they did this time - IIRC, the Biden administration feds raided one of their dairy farms & that was their motivation to vote en masse for Trump.

We'll watch from the other side of the Atlantic how the great libertarianism experiment goes for the USA.

Public service announcement: libertarians aren't the ones who want to shrink government enough to fit through your bedroom door. Those would be the Republicans, who are now in power. They are classified in the opposite camp (authoritarians).

How is a small government authoritarian? By nature, it is the opposite... You have freedoms to do as you please without government interference.

did we mention crypto scams?

Basically this.

Most of the commenters here seem to be taking it on faith that these government organizations are necessary and serving a crucial function. But the entire thrust of this election is that the majority of the country doesn't share that level of faith in the federal government.

"When in doubt, slash and see what happens" seems like a highly effective, albeit a bit reckless, approach to finding out which agencies are truly needed and which are not.

I (sincerely) wish you and your family to not be on the path of one of the people who will rush to profit from the lack of regulation.

I preemptively nominate "unexpected knock-on effects" as "periphrase of the year" for 2025 ;)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com