one issue voting is oft portrayed as the act of the small minded zealot. “it’s always more complex, you should always take more things into account.”
seems reasonable.
seems plausible.
but what if it isn’t and we’re just getting the issue wrong?
on many or even all of the issues around which elections are held, “don’t be a one issue voter” is likely true, but this is because the elections themselves are part of the problem and are mostly playing superficial games on topics that matter a lot less than people think.
it’s smallball coke vs pepsi changes.
it’s the magician’s flourish to pull your eye away from the trick.
meanwhile, the vast undercurrent of what some have come to call “the deep state” (a term falling into disuse because the deep state itself HATES the moniker and strives to see it consigned to the tinfoil hat bin) continues garnering ever more power and manipulative menace.
donkey vs elephant is a puppet show. the real game is being played on another board, one beneath the surface of electoral politics, because while democracy driven flavors of the month come and go, bureaucracy is forever and it has ALL gone gangrenous.
we have for so long allowed so many unaccountable agencies to determine what can be bought and sold and built and allowed and to allocate such vast sums of capital and steer and gatekeep entire areas of science that they have become odd chimeras of feudal rulership and endemic regulatory capture by the regulated. trying to find any daylight between them and their corporate partners has become impossible. it’s one blob. one beating heart.
this is the real illness.
and left unchecked, it will be a fatal one.
crony corporatism is the antithesis of free markets and free people. it is subtle subjugation posing as safety and self-serving circular reasoning posing as “proof of bonafides.”
“this must be a good regulation, even the banks/insurance companies/car makers/cattle ranchers support it!”
this is the worst kind of lie.
of course they do. it benefits them, pays subsidy, kills competition, and generates oligopoly among the pvivileged at the expense of new entrants. regulation and compliance regimes ALWAYS favor big companies and it is always cheaper to buy politicians to slant the playing field than to compete in the marketplace.
it’s easier to hand out trillions in green subsidies and grants than to develop technologies that can compete on a level field with existing ones.
it’s easy for big companies to comply with $2 million in new compliance costs and studies and reporting. it’s a stake through the heart of small business. and that’s why big business likes it.
they do not want free markets, they want the free profits that come from preventing others from selling against them.
let me tell you a story:
the wife of one of my closest friends had a business making baby clothes. she was a graphic designer and was doing fairly well creating fun images to put on all cotton onesies made by manufacturers and selling them. there was a rapidly booming business segment of others like her. it turns out parents like unique, local, interesting baby gear.
now, who did NOT like this gear were the big companies in the space. it took customers. it took revenues. and there was no way they could compete because their cycle times for small batch production were seasons vs weeks. these little companies could have ten new products in the time it took gap kids to release one.
so the “industry” collaborated with “the regulators” and decided that new “safety rules” were needed. suddenly, you just could not trust a cotton onesie that 10’s of thousands of kids had worn or the silk screen paints used for a generation. every single SKU had to be individually tested for safety because “hey, you never know, maybe the exact same footie pajamas with the exact same paints is now deadly dangerous because the picture on it is a sailboat and not a bunny!”
this destroyed an entire cottage industry at a stroke. the cost to test was on the order of $25k per SKU; no big deal for gap, far in excess of SKU revenue for all the small players who, in aggregate, were cutting into profits but who, alone, could never afford this. it was custom crafted to look like safety while actually being a precise tactical strike against innovation and competition. there was never a safety issue, only a set of vested interests in oligopoly and anti-consumer behavior.
it was easy to blow this ball by an unsuspecting public. almost no one outside industry even noticed it and those that did saw tepid media stories about “new safety rules protect toddlers! even industry giants support this common sense legislation!” and so 1000 small businesses died and a few big companies retained a hammerlock on kiddie clothes.
and once you start digging into regulation, how it is made, and what it is for, you realize that this story is EVERYWHERE.
it’s THE story. the only story. the story that recurs as the modal outcome and that is never told true in the media because that’s just another fiefdom, another grift, and another deep state dominated firehose of false flags and false data.
they tell you it’s a board to “stop misinformation.” then you find out it’s a purpose designed propaganda factory.
media claims that “democracy dies in darkness” then throws a black bag over your head and calls it sunshine because that’s what the advertisers want.
it is endless. it is endemic. and that is a feature, not a bug.
they are coming fast now on every board. it’s become so vast and so blatant that it cannot be hidden, so you might as well bum rush. things got so desperate in the last couple years that the systems and the nets and leashes became starkly visible. actors had to step out of the shadows and show themselves.
we’ve spoken much about the FDA, CDC, and NIH here. but this is the tiny tip of a titanic iceberg.
the EPA is even worse and far larger. all their fuel regulations, greenwash, greenmail, targeted taxation, and ridiculous regulation have these same effects: they pay big companies to do things the market does not value, disadvantages or proscribes those things the market wants, and ruthlessly preferences the large over the small and the connected over those who will not pay for play.
it’s a vicious aristocracy of privilege to the plunder so aptly predicted by bastiat. it’s codification and justification of ever more blatant rapine.
“When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.”
―Frédéric Bastiat
and the tawdry justifications pushed as the science™ or the ethics™ keep the demos backing them and thinking they are serving themselves and not being fleeced like lost lambs in wolf den . it’s interlocking fields of fire supporting one another.
gensler at SEC wants to raise ESG and environmental reporting to the standards of other financial reporting. this will impose untold billions in costs on companies. they even want to extend it into the private sphere.
like sarbanes oxley before it, this will preference the big and strangle the small. an extra few million a year in public company compliance costs is functionally zero for google, but it’s going to take a significant number of small companies down just like sarbox and pile of other acts did. (it will also provide endless consulting jobs to phalanxes of ideologues and cronies to “tech you how to comply.”)
the number of public companies has dropped by about 60% since the late 90’s and this is probably a significant understatement of the real drop as the count has been propped up by a now dying SPAC boom.
and the SEC wants the next cull.
only our team gets access to capital. we get to gatekeep equity issuance and bank lending. and that leads to the next step:
this enviro reporting/ESG scoring that is being represented as “just more info for investors so how can it be bad?” will not just ravage smallco profits:
it’s the trojan horse for dictatorial control.
once this information is mandated and collected, it’s a small step to setting policy based on it, delisting companies whose scores fail to please, taxing them, subsiding the “good ones,” and 20 other forms of fascism and top down corporate control under the auspices of “green” or “justice.”
oh, you lent to an oil co or bank a gun manufacturer? sorry, you cannot use the fed funds window. please bring yourself into compliance.
make no mistake: this is the foundation of a social credit system for companies. and it will, left unchecked, grow to infect everything.
if you want to see what the late stage metastases of this trend looks like, look no further than china (whose governance methods so many in the west seem to envy of late)
they have built thousands of these “covid quarantine camps” and mandated digital health passports that can be turned red at will for “suspected exposure.” you are one button push from gulag. all the time.
it’s all pretext. china is bracing for mass civil strife as their “economic miracle” gets revealed for the debt fueled profitless potemkin village that is has most been. they have already started using “covid” to quell riots.
remember the bank runs? they stopped them and sent everyone home by flipping the mandated health passports on their phones red. disobey, and you’re arrested and sent to corona camp. maybe you’ll come home once you get “re-educated.” maybe not.
the west loves to say “that cannot happen here.” but it has. the 30’s and 40’s were full of this. so were the past 3 years. it’s building again. lots of “thought leaders” like the idea.
and they are flat out telling you how it’s going to be done. the intersection of public health, econ/green, and captured media have been calling this shot for ages. the move to central bank digital currency is a key lynchpin: track all spending, turn off the ability to buy X at will from on high. that, my friends, is pure subjugation. you will have no privacy and no agency. happy seems unlikely.
and the FBI is going to gleefully enforce it. so are the legions of new IRSers.
the department of education will demand to indoctrinate it and inculcate the new “moral code that glorifies it.”
international agencies like the UN and WHO will spread it wide and link all the fiefs together.
it’s not a theory. this is a real life conspiracy evolving endlessly as emergent property and built to last indefinitely and to place ever more control of your life and livelihood outside the purview of anything you can touch or perhaps even see.
and THAT is why you must become a one issue voter.
the only issue that matters is ending the bureaucracy, taking away its power, and making the deep state shallow again.
that’s it. it’s that simple. anything else is just painting over rust or putting a smiley face on a slavering hyena.
what does the department of education even do? nothing useful that i can see apart from prevent innovation and slowly turn coffee into pensions. they stir up “anger issues” to keep your eye off the other ball and to proselytize prostration.
what does the US get from supporting the UN or WHO or even NATO? anything apart from grasping demand for money and protection from folks who then turn around and demand ever more and seek to impose stricture on us in exchange?
the EPA is just the CDC but worse.
the SEC is a division of blackrock and a slush fund for the connected parts of finance. the revolving door is so fast i’m not even sure they can tell who is private vs public sector anymore.
NIH is beyond help.
is the FBI even a net benefit or just a praetorian guard for the corrupt political plutocrats ready to bury you for opposition to the regime but blind to burning, looting, and corruption at the highest levels.
in the richest, most technologically advanced country in the history of countries, election integrity has become a punchline.
seriously, what is ANY of this for?
how does it serve we the people?
trying to change it is futile. this much power in these sorts of hands will ALWAYS go awry. the rotten, putrid outcomes to favor the few are inevitable. it does not take a plot, but the confluence of emergent interests will always make it one.
so end it. we do not need it.
fund kids, not schools and allow free choice. sell the dept of ed offices for condos.
replace the CDC and NIH with open source collaborative reporting and open adversarial analysis. end ALL government funding of science and technological subsidy.
make FDA approval voluntary like ISO and allow competing forms of certification to emerge.
eliminate the credential culture that limits everything from law and medicine to hair braiding and bar ownership.
declare the SEC a weapon of mass destruction and probably the Fed with it.
let old media die.
all these things are doable, but they need a plurality of politicians to make them happen and SO many are bought and paid for that we’re going to need massive turnover and strong, strident alignment in this issue.
2024 will be the time. that is when you could get a president and a congress all in concert on this issue. so make it THE issue. because it is the only issue. it’s the keystone, the freeing move for everything else that leads to human flourishing.
and it’s not actually that hard. we only need to win for a minute to just kill it. defund it. start on day one of a presidential administration and by the end, you’ll have the weeds ripped out so thoroughly that they will not grow back. or you can suffer slow death by dandelion.
stop getting distracted by the food fights of team donkey and team elephant and start demanding this and only this.
“what will you do to reduce the federal bureaucracy and free us from its yoke?”
what if there was no other question?
what if every voice were raised in asking it?
what might we accomplish and how much freer might we breathe?
it’s a binary: free markets and free people or deep states and plutocratic permission culture.
choose wisely.
Brilliant, one of your finest posts yet. All of the soy bugman and karen DEI/ESG commmissars must be fired from government and its labyrinth of 3 letter agencies. Here’s a voter guide for midterms: https://open.substack.com/pub/yuribezmenov/p/how-to-win-an-election?r=12n5dp&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
I agree philosophically, but you do not address two things:
1. there are no free and fair elections in this country
2. the other major party is just as bad and just as captured