State Capture | Hacker News Reader

State Capture

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67 pointsbloomingkales41 comments

What Musk is doing with DOGE parallels what the Chicago school consultants did in Russia under Yeltsin during the 90s. It didn't go well.

How does it parallel that?

I searched "chicago school consultants russia yeltsin" and found this article [0], which goes into great detail and the parallels are pretty obvious.

[0] https://www.thenation.com/article/world/harvard-boys-do-russ...

Now this is interesting.. when this had 17 votes in 17 minutes I was like "yeah this is gonna get flagged" so I left it open in a tab. Now I see it's not flagged, yet I can't find it on the first 20 pages of the front page, either.

I went looking and you are correct. Super interesting. It appears there's some auto mod feature or something?

It's nothing new; happens frequently. My guess is it's a compromise between a hard flag kill that silences all discussion, and letting the submission continue trending.

Good. The discussion quickly became the 2025 version of this, everyone proceeding to argue with him:

https://thehardtimes.net/blog/why-i-quit-my-job-and-left-my-...

Good what? I wasn't complaining that shit gets memory holed here, I observed something I had never seen before.

The discussion seems generally really informative, it's mostly the people who don't want the topic discussed who are shit at discussing it. It's a skill issue.

Annmnnnnnd we’re flagged.

This is normal. Each user flag downranks the post until it accumulates enough of them to be "flagged".

I do wonder why they downvoted, denial? ideological capture? are the majority of users in HN oligarchs?

> The term has also been used against Elon Musk by critics of U.S. President Donald Trump.

The term is predicated on government doing the right thing (and the persuasive private interest doing the wrong thing). History furnishes thousands of examples. In Musk's case it's the opposite. He's helping prevent government doing the wrong thing: unnecessarily burdening productive endeavour (e.g. internet, rockets, tunnels, electric vehicles) and interesting work (e.g. science and exploration) through overregulation, as well as wasting tax payer money.

In this moment many people dislike Elon. But history will give a clearer picture of whether their dislike was for legitimate reasons (like the alleged 'state capture'), or less legitimate reasons (like the recent US election outcome, or clickbaity news stories).

History is not always that esoteric. Everyone said Iraq was about oil and would be a disaster. That’s exactly what it was. In fact, people were saying it before it happened, as it happened, and after it happened.

You see:

https://youtu.be/tAjqGnQpVks

All those people back then were not wrong. And all these people today are also not wrong.

It's easy to judge whether reducing government waste and improving living standards is good/bad (obviously it's good). What will be less enduring is the current Elon-hate which is more based on tribalism and mood than reason.

I think you and many people in this space are just ignoring traits. Everybody in tech knows this. Long as you are a “rockstar”, we ignore traits.

I don’t even want to begin listing them because it might burn some people, but here goes:

- empathy (cannot sit side by side with ruthlessness)

- honesty (cannot sit side by side with corruption)

- charity (cannot sit side by side with greed)

- morality (cannot sit side by side with amorality)

- peaceful (cannot sit side by side with power hunger, vindictiveness)

Those aren’t exactly culture fits in tech. So, what do we have here? Non-empathetic corrupt amoral greedy power hungry genius. The last trait is the only one you see, for whatever reason.

We are not saints, but we have fucking try a little bit here.

> I think you and many people in this space are just ignoring traits.

Or people just disagree with you.

Disagreeing doesn’t mean they are right. So another way to say what you said was maybe they are just incorrect. I’ll take the silence as incorrectness, especially because it’s not a climate to be silent.

Is it tribalism to judge a person based on their stated opinions, their actions, and the organisations and people they hang out with?

> It's easy to judge whether reducing government waste and improving living standards is good/bad (obviously it's good).

What you have described is obviously good. The question remains whether DOGE will achieve those aims, or if it does, whether the side-effects of its work will outweigh the benefits. To go back to the Iraq war, the mission statement of destroying weapons of mass destruction was obviously good. Unfortunately, there were no weapons of mass destruction, and even if there had been, the tremendous chaos and cost of the operation would have been a large price to pay.

I am sceptical that DOGE is really about efficiency in the first place. And even if it is, I am even more sceptical that they will be able to achieve these aims, based on the behaviour that they have shown so far, and based on what I have already experienced of government efficiency initiatives.

You sparked a thought / mental model:

The US ruling class periodically senses "blood in the water", and sets things up for a "feeding frenzy" (money and/or power), where a small, well-connected elite engorge themselves on hapless victims.

Iraq and Afghanistan provided such opportunities during my lifetime, and before that, it was the Vietnam war, and history has plenty more examples farther back.

In this most recent feeding frenzy, it appears to me, that the victims are some important (maybe critical) parts of the US itself. A sort of auto-cannibalism, if you will.

They define efficiency to exclude benefiting the working class.

> It's easy to judge whether reducing government waste ... is good/bad (obviously it's good).

Don't be so silly. Outside of a few small areas like fraud, if something is "government waste" or not is often totally subjective Is NASA "government waste"? Arguably it is (though Musk and most of HN would disagree).

I'd argue what Musk is doing isn't "eliminating waste" or "increasing efficiency," but rather implementing a purely opinionated refactoring to match his views.

Never thought I'd hear being a nazi referred to as tribalism. But you are right.

"History will show that letting a bunch of teenagers managed by a narcissist wreck the government was a good idea."

Yeah, right.

Is America supposed to be a republic or a dictatorship?

What transparency do we have into Musk's decisions? Why should we give one person power to ignore Congressional laws and the Constitution? How is that different to a dictatorship?

So the guy who has repeatedly misrepresented or misunderstood how the government works as his staff are tearing it apart and firing tens of thousands of people is... good actually? I'm sorry, I don't buy it and the only way history will buy it is when they finally dismantle the Department of Education and force it into the history textbooks.

He did it for twitter and it worked amazingly well. A lot of smart people scoffed at how there was no way he could run twitter with 80% fewer staff (here's a great example of the sentiment typical at the time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkNkSQ42jg4&t=22m20s). But Twitter is just fine.

If 80% of twitter was bloat, imagine government!

Debatably twitter had really smart people build systems that could operate without human intervention. So not really sure we want to say that was a success story for Elon Musk so much as he bought a software company where the software worked. Since the take over the product has gotten noticeably worse as far as reliability and with the algorithmic content promotion. The core functionality has stayed, but the overall experience has gotten worse.

I do basically agree with the concept that twitter is running without as many people as they had - it is in fact doing that. It's just doing worse than it was and has been a pretty poor business venture for its investors except those who were using it for its capabilities to influence... things appeared to work out for those people. So if the point of a business is to make money and the way they are supposed to do that is through a software product I would say the results are mixed at this moment.

Now so far as comparing the government to a software company... not sure thats really how we want to look at this or try to operate the government. Government is basically supposed to exist for market externalities - things the markets can't or shouldn't take care of. Is there bloat in the government? any sane adult can answer that question with a yes without even blinking... but theres also stuff thats easy to gut for savings that we need when shit hits the fan. Thats the stuff thats not so great to save money on.

Improving the government is a great thing and we should strive for it... I would just prefer ya know Congress do it since its their job and not an eccentric billionaire.

How did it go "amazingly well"? In Musk's own words Twitter is barely breaking even[0].

Estimates by Fidelity say that about 80% of Twitter business value evaporated under Musk rule [1].

[0]https://www.business-standard.com/companies/news/elon-musk-x...

[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2024/10/02/business/elon-musk-twitte...

> How did it go "amazingly well"?

Extremely high site reliability (others claimed it would literally go down, have outages). And the eng team's ability to pump out features: https://x.com/nima_owji/status/1872708051494695422/photo/1

These metrics are irrelevant for business. If it means something for predicting Musk involvement in government it's this: there will be some meaningless metrics by which it will be declared a success.

No - the opposite (!) - these two metrics are not random or meaningless - they're precisely the metrics the 2022 naysayers said Twitter/Musk would fail on! - that is, these are the results according to the metrics of the naysayers!. If we wanted to select more favourable ones, we could. But these are the very metrics the 2022 haters claimed he'd flunk!

It's easy to add reliability to a system if you scale the interested userbase down. Which is exactly what Xitter is doing by pushing content far to the right, and making it a more hostile environment for discourse.

Like, yes, I can run a reliable system with 20% of the engineers if I'm aiming for 20% of the userbase and 20% of the quality of the platform that I was originally trying to run.

Even if you think the government is too big, this is not the proper way to shrink it. Let Congress take care of it; his party has majority.

Meaningfully reducing the size of government is a surprisingly rare occurrence throughout history. A counter question: how should it be done? Elon's strategy is bold; 'deleting' entire departments. But that decision seems somewhat rational, if you agree that it doesn't need ~450 departments. I don't claim to have answers, just that the Elon approach seems bold but, frankly, quite sound. What are the alternatives?

Milton Friedman seems to think ending tax deduction at payroll might work, since forcing people to write a fat check every year will get them screaming to their reps or electing frugal reps.

Lowering taxes isn't frugal. Frugality is on the spending side, not the revenue side.

Such screaming never tells you how to cut the revenue side. (Except, of course, for the IRS, who generates orders of magnitude more revenue than they spend.) When asked, people will always say "Cut the spending on those people over there; spending on me is necessary and critical."

I'd argue that's what's needed is less screaming and more coherent discussion of national priorities. But I suppose that just invoking somebody's ideological grudges and firing everybody in the vicinity of them is good, too.

Milton Friedman painstakingly designed the income tax withholding precisely to facilitate increased spending. Given his great body of works and actual experience in implementation, I don't think his opinions are brushed away by your strawman fight about what frugality was said to be .

He advocated for eliminating automatic withholding because he saw exactly how it manufactured assent for spending [0], an effect of his own mechanisms he helped design for the circa WW2 war era.

https://archive.org/details/twoluckypeopleme00frie

> Meaningfully reducing the size of government is a surprisingly rare occurrence throughout history.

"meaningfully" is doing all the lifting here. This is saying nothing.

And it's not as rare as oligarchs persecuting political enemies and slashing anything that doesn't benefit them, harming millions of people leading to anything but more bad things along the same rotten line; the rate there is 100%.

It's not bold, much less "sound" to cut peanuts (compared to what will be taken in the form of tax cuts and govt contracts) while talking nonsense to an audience that understands and cares even less than him, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42996385

> "meaningfully" is doing all the lifting here.

You got me (I actually felt guilt writing that weaselly sentence!). The reason I still wrote it is because I'm reasonably confident it's correct (for some definition of 'meaningfully').

For example, in my lifetime, I can't recall any OECD country cutting its government spending by, say, 20% or more (I haven't looked it up, but I'd guess Greece during austerity might be the best example in the past 20 years, even then I doubt it was as much as 20% [0]).

[0] There's another annoyingly confounding factor, which is Keynesian economics suggests governments should not cut spending during a crisis (or at a time when private spending is likely to be too low), which creates a 'capture' all of its own! (a bit like 'too big to fail' did for banks).

Elon's 'Strategy' looks a lot more like consolidating the power of government in the executive branch than actually reducing the size of government. That actually makes government bigger and scarier in my view.

I would now consider if anyone else gets the chance to govern, they should meaningfully reduce the power of the executive branch aggressively in order to avoid this kind of consolidation in the future. But good luck with that and also having a functioning gov't.

Meow meow meow

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