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Comment by foobarbecue | Hacker News Reader

I think it's worse than that. Appears to me that the methodology here is intentional sabotage of the government. When your platform is explictly anti-government (also, explictly anti-empathy, and implictly anti-expert), and someone hands you the government, you smash it, along with the lives of all those losers who dedicated themselves to public service.

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Don't forget to say "See! Government doesn't work, we've been right all along!" after you've smashed it.

Exactly, I’m glad you mentioned it because there are many who can’t see through the smoke. This is the long con but I still struggle to understand the motive there, if for nothing else, is it the simple ideal that government should be small? Why go through all the trouble?

It’s a combination of people who literally want to own everything even if the only things left are smoking ruins and the useful idiots they have recruited to do the work.

I’m not even sure it’s a deliberate conspiracy. It’s more like Bryan Cantrill’s lawnmower.

If you replace the country names with software products and the columns with “on prem” and “cloud” the Trump tariff charts look like an Oracle contract renewal.

These people hate the idea of the public interest, and want to see everything replaced with a privately owned counterpart.

Because once the government is not able to provide certain things like education or public transportation they can profit by selling you private religious schools that further their agenda or tunnels filled with Teslas (see Las Vegas).

Democratic governments tends to create and maintain a lot of checks and balanced on corporations. Things like workers rights, consumer rights, product quality, environment protections, etc etc. Many things that corporations would love to do to make more money are illegal. That makes it harder to earn money. Removing such barriers seems like a pretty straightforward motive to me.

The people who want to remove these barriers are naive, because the same barriers are removed for their competitors, which ends up driving a race to the bottom.

Yes, this is the GOP playbook in a nutshell.

1. Rail against the idea that any social program can work, or that the government can do a good job administering it.

2. Fight for amendments to bills around it that reduce its funding or scope in key, critical ways.

3. Let the new thing fail, because you crippled the bill that authorized it.

4. Crow about how you were right all along, that government can't do this or that, and that these social programs are doomed to fail.

5. Then outsource that government work to private firms, preferably ones run by your friends and/or lobbyists, who are both more expensive and yet do a worse job too.

6. (Optional) after decades of the failures of the private sector, re-nationalize the industry and take huge losses. Loop back to step 1 in 5 years.

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