Oh no, did somebody gamble with everyone's safety and security that making a nuclear state go mask-off fascist would deepen their negative tax rate?
The Network State: How to Startup a Country
It's so much more ambitious than that. They explicitly want Balkanization and formalized oligarchy along the Singapore/S. Korea/Hong Kong/Philippines model.
They want balkanization? I want Balkanization because I think it would break the federal government's kneecaps (making it harder for corporates and fascists to leverage) and finally let Texas and Florida stop dragging everyone else down. I'm now automatically more suspicious of my own position.
They want balkanization?
Yes. That's a lot of what the "Freedom Cities" push is about. Create a network of autonomous enclaves where a single billionaire or board room effectively operates as a tyrant. Govern everything through permissions-based digital infrastructure (id badges to enter and leave any building or use any transit service, credit scores determined by years of service and employer approval rating, all property rented from the local oligarch, all residents are just at-will employees). It's a pure technocratic Company Town model.
I want Balkanization because I think it would break the federal government’s kneecaps
Part of the insanity of it all is in how guys like Musk and Theil and Zuckerburg and Bezos don't see any inherent value in a public federal system. They consider federalism an impediment to their vision of techno-feudalism and they see the money that the federal government uses to staff and support itself as resources wasted on a bureaucracy better managed by the private sector.
They are Anarcho-Capitalists in the most literal sense.
Most people consider a fascist takeover causing a collapse of democratic institutions worse than a recession, is this really news?
Economic downturns tend to cause social unrest which legitimize expansion of the security state.
In this case, it appears that a fascist dictatorship is deliberately inducing the downtown to justify expansion of the DHS.
Naomi Klein laid out how this has happened in the past (particularly in the former Soviet states after the break up of the USSR) in her book Shock Doctrine. The pattern has also been laid out as a counter-insurgency strategy in Vincent Bevins's The Jakarta Method.
But the nut of it is that you tend to get both.
Thanks for the tip. Don't want to argue but in the case I could have either I'd definitely pick the recession.
@MicroWave
"We have a breaking down of the monetary order."
At this point I don't even know what to stuff under my mattress!
Probably ammo, canned goods, a duck.
Also need a pair of sneakers. Then you'll be covering all of the "Four F's" of survival.
Food, fire-arms, footwear, fuck-buddy (has u/fuckswithducks come to Lemmy?)
Damnit! I forgot the mattress duck!
Should have thought of that when voting ...
There was a lot more in that interview than "tariffs bad".
“Right now we are at a decision-making point and very close to a recession,” Dalio said on NBC News’ “Meet the Press.” “And I’m worried about something worse than a recession if this isn’t handled well.”
The hedge fund billionaire said he’s more concerned about trade disruptions, mounting U.S. debt, and emerging world powers bringing down the international economic and geopolitical structure that has been in place since the end of World War II.
“We are going from multilateralism, which is largely an American world order type of thing, to a unilateral world order in which there’s great conflict,” he said.
Dalio said five forces drive history: the economy, internal political conflict, the international order, technology, and acts of nature such as floods and pandemics. Trump’s tariffs have understandable goals, Dalio said, but they are being implemented in a “very disruptive” way that creates global conflict.
The thing is, Dalio has been warning about this for years now. Here's a link from 2023 where he was talking about disruptions:
Here's a link from 2021 where he was warning about the same thing:
Here's a link talking about him sounding alarms in 2019:
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/09/ray-dalio-burning-man
What he's warning about is something more like Peter turchins secular cycles. A perfect storm is approaching that could lead to a revolution or war or the end of the American empire. The tariffs are a concern, but a tactical one where the whole board is in play.