DOGE this

an aristocracy fails in the matrix

meet brian. brian is a self-styled “media personality” from MSN and other venues.

brian is frightened.

i chose him because he seems an apt and representative example of a viewpoint emerging in response to the increasingly apparent roadmap of elon and vivek’s “DOGE” as others start to see what certain internet felines were discussing the other day about what’s coming to DC.

what’s interesting is how much we agree on what’s in store for the swamp.

obviously, there is some divergence on how we feel about it.

let’s hear brian in his own (recently viral) words:

watching the same people who cheer led for the creation of millions of regulations via unaccountable rubber stamp and executive fiat act like the removal of same is the end of functional governance is instructive.

i suspect they may even be sincere.

they experience a return to rights and freedom as loss and chaos.

it's how you can tell they are an entrenched aristocracy of permanent state. it’s also how you can tell that you’re over the target.

pity the poor “federal worker” that most oppressed of americans…

apparently once you're used to wielding dictatorial control, losing it feels like tyranny. one literally mistakes the freedom of others for the oppression of elites by unjust wreckers and the rollback of that which one rolled out without accountability or just or even legal right seems like some vastly unfair deprival of prerogative.

“how dare you delimit our right to rule!” decries the bureaucratic class and the professors and pundits who cling remora-like to them seeking power, privilege, and prestige. it’s sort of startling in the perfection of the honesty of its overt inversion.

this is, of course, precisely what our framers intended:

government by the consent of the governed not by the vast, unchecked fiat of unelected technocracy.

the monstrous sprawl of these executive agencies and their relentless and pervasive intrusion into all aspects of lives and livelihoods is not just incompatible to their vision, it stands anathema to it.

and "removing our ability to oppress you is oppression and chaos" is not much of a moral platform.

this smacks of nothing so much as a dying dictatorship warning that you need them to order your life for you "for your own good."

“what will the filthy proles do without us!?!” marie exclaimed on her way to the scaffold…

they go running for the predictable pity party claims of “fear for the outcomes of reining in our lawlessness” but it rings desperately false.

this is a demand that congress do its job and stop punting vast powers and monies to unaccountable agencies and playing “hide the ball” with societal control. anyone who has ever run a business or tried to build a home can tell you: the regulations are a thicket, one you cannot fight through. you cannot build or operate without complying and often being tied up in courts or planning or permitting for years or decades. it’s the death of freedom and of innovation, a strangle vine on the entrepreneurial class and progress.

the stupidity of it can raze whole industries in a matter of years.

and then all your industry dies.

the US has been managing to grow despite regulation, but imagine the rate at which it could grow without it.

it’s easy to see the stagnation that awaits from an EU style system, but what’s difficult to see is what has been left on the table in the US from the “growth that never was” as the damage of rule makers and awful fiscal and monetary policy.

from 1947 to 2000 US per capita GDP compounded at 2.24% a year meaning per capita real GDP would double every 31 years.

in 2000 (dot com crash) it took a step function down from which is never recovered.

a new stage of adventurism in monetary and regulatory policy had begun.

from 2000 to present, the figure has been 1.37% a year resulting in 51 years to double. that’s a dramatic slowing.

had we retained the old rates of growth, real GDP per capita would be 24% higher today, roughly $16,000 per person (off a base of $69k in chained 2017 dollars, so actually more like $20,640 in 2024 dollars.). that’s nearly half of median personal income of $42k. this is not a small variance.

it’s also the only possible path out of the current debt and entitlement mess that we are in. cut spending, bring budgets into something resembling balance, and then grow baby, grow.

this idea that “cutting back the regulatory state to its legal and intended purpose” is somehow “the death of the federal government as we know it” is an astonishingly telling statement as is the framing as “a takeover.”

why, it’s enough to make an internet cat reach for his drawer of meme templates…

ahh, there it is.

it seems to me that the interesting part here is that i fully agree with brian about being an end to business as usual. we just disagree about the desirability of such an undertaking.

and so, i put it to you as we frame the key question that seems to define this divide:

“is the federal government as we know it something to defend or something to disassemble?”

because that’s really where the line is going to be drawn in the contention to come.

and for perhaps the first time since the 1930’s, the game is one that can be won because the slanted gameboard has been overturned.

the potency of the intersection of west virginia vs EPA and loper vs raimondo should not be under-estimated.

they held that agencies cannot decide major questions of economic or political significance without congressional say so and ended “chevron deference” whereby courts deferred to “experts” at agencies about the interpretation of their own governing and regulatory statutes.

it was an endless game of “hide the ball” where congress would pass some platitudinous and vague regulatory law to avoid admitting what was meant to be and then leave it to the bureaucrats to decide what it meant by grabbing whatever power they deemed desirable.

over 18,000 cases of regulatory deference were decided on “chevron.” it was the SCOTUS equivalent of “trust the experts” and allowed these technocratic fiefdoms to grow and run riot unchecked and unbalanced by anything save their own ambition. it’s how we got the CDC imposing rent moratoriums, the fed acting as an agent of stimulus, the SEC pushing ESG, and the EPA becoming the boss of everything from cars to powerplants to whether you can gather rainwater in a barrel.

corner post v board put 40 years of past regulation back on the table as new businesses can challenge old regs without constraint from a statute of limitations. no more “it’s the law because it has been the law” as a defense.

the true genius of the DOGE roadmap lies in making the choke points work for us rather than rate limit us. to challenge each regulation in court is impossible. it’s too slow, too expensive, too absurd. it would take centuries.

instead, these new rulings flip the burden of proof. no longer is it “prove the EPA should not have this power” it’s “prove that it should and until you do, we’re turning it off.” this is as it should be. the idea that regulators get to do whatever they want and self-interpret their own vague rules until proven guilty of overreach is outlandish. it’s the opposite of a rights based republic. but with the burden on them to have to show that any power is rightful BEFORE they may exercise it or resume its application, the game is very different.

now the chokepoint of the courts works for the freedom of we the people instead of for the presumed prerogative of leviathanian apparatchiks.

note that these "lists" of regulations to remove will only be powers granted to executive agencies without any established purview or approval from congress. this play literally only works if the power was unduly usurped.

so ignore the howls of “bUt tHEy BRokW mUh gOverNMenT!” they broke it first. this is recission of rampant regulatory regime as the path back to where we once flourished.

if it really matters, restore such powers properly through congress.

follow the constitution.

pretty telling to call that "chaos."

just what have they mistaken for "order?"

so, hell yes, with any luck this does destroy the government as we know it and not a moment too soon. the real hostile takeover was the takeover of america, the flouting of its constitution and its checks and balances, and the ruination of the republic by a self-serving and unaccountable permanent state of technocrats, bureaucrats, and regulators accountable to nothing save their own appeals to their own authority.

even were they ethical and capable, this would be dictatorship, but in the event they are corrupt, incompetent, and have grown fat upon the backs of we the people. of course they are. “as soon as you allow politicians to determine that which is bought or sold, the first thing bought or sold will always be politicians” goes treble for bureaucrats. they are less accountable, less visible, and cheaper to buy especially given the revolving door of regulator and regulated that passes for technocracy in DC these days. it’s the same faces at FDA and pfizer, treasury and blackrock, EPA and whatever green grift just got hot.

and that needs to end.

the arguments of brian and those like him are literally lamenting the end of an extra-constitutional coup as the death of american governance rather than its restoration.

take a hike guys. no one around here is buying that anymore.

america is about the freedom of the people and the consent of the governed, not the aristocratic impositions of “experts” ensconced in the ivory tower demesne of the regulatasuarus. such structure stands opposed to liberty, property, progress, and safety. it’s the loss of everyhting in service of technocratic autocracy.

rolling it back, setting it on fire, and pushing it into the sea IS america and anyone who tells you different is likely protecting their own privilege or playing the dupe for someone who is.

this has the potential to be the work of a generation and to free the generations after.

this has the potential to be once more a morning in america, the road home.

ending “the federal government as we know it” is the path to restoring the american republic as we once knew it.

LFG.