Bullet Points: How government ought to work

[Note: today’s newsletter is a bit more disjointed and rant-y than usual. Been a busy week.]

I’m not running for public office, so no one is ever going to ask for my vision of what my vision of American Greatness entails. But if someone did, here is what I would say about my ideal system of government:

There are public goods that are make society, collectively, better. A big part of what government does is to subsidize, these public goods, so we can all be better off. It pays for them by collecting taxes. That’s a big part of what government is for.

A great America is a country with great cities, great schools, great arts and culture, great public transit, ambitious investment in scientific research. It’s a country where people, for the most part, can make a decent-enough wage that they can spend time living rather than struggling to survive. It’s a country where the law is applied equally to all.

It seems to me that, for much of the 20th century, we at least had an approximation of this sort of government. (The struggle for equal rights under the law was the hard uphill climb. But we did at least take seriously that public goods deserve public funds.) It was replaced, under Reagan, by a foundational faith that unregulated capitalism would provide such overwhelming abundance that we would all naturally be made better off. (Call this the Milton Friedman school for telling rich people what they want to hear. Or call it neoliberalism, for short, if you prefer.)

The hard part for my ideal is the “how do we work out our shared values” part. For that, you need democracy. And democracy is a mess. But its a fundamentally workable, responsive system, so long as you put in the civic effort and don’t neglect the maintenance. Democracy is the best of all available options, but we shouldn’t pretend it is does not require constant effort.

And it turns out that taxation is pretty damn important to the democratic equation. Let wealth inequality get too far out of hand, while also letting the wealthy spend whatever they want to influence elections, and democratic institutions start catering solely to the interests of the wealthy, which in turn leads to a collapse of confidence in democracy as a system of government, and then the whole thing falls apart and it takes probably decades to rebuild <imagine a map, with a little pin and the label “you’re here now.”>

So much of government is ruinously complicated right now. I don’t see how it gets better, at least in the near-term. But it really doesn’t need to be so complicated, if we would only return to some simple fundamentals.

Stop putting abject faith in markets to do things that markets are systematically bad at (the provision of public goods. The equal application of the law. Foreign policy.).

Spend public money to fund public goods. Pay for it through taxes, especially on the wealthy. Limit spending in elections, so every voice gets approximately the same vote. Put government in charge of the messy work of determining what counts as a public good, and how much public spending it deserves. Come on, now. This isn’t hard in the abstract.

(This, by the way, is at least a version of the Abundance agenda. If the Abundance movement stood for spending public money to support public priorities, I would be an Abundance guy. The reason I deeply distrust the Abundance movement is that it only sort of and occasionally stands for this basic value. It is equally open to a model of society where we free up the wealthy to do whatever they see fit with no government interference or public counter-pressure, under the faux-innocent assumption that we don’t know how that always turns out.)

A few disjointed reading recommendations from this week, all of which have contributed to this little rant:

Comedian Chris Gethard, ranting to Jesse David Fox about the “Creator Economy Apocalypse.” This was the most interesting thing I read or watched this week. The written version is here, or you can watch the YouTube interview below. (If I got the embed function to work. Still figuring out how Beehiiv works…)

Gethard, if you don’t know him, is both a very funny and very successful comedian. There’s an episode of The Chris Gethard Show called “The Box” which is downright legendary. You should watch it right now. But also, I mean, there was a show called The Chris Gethard Show. That’s a guy who has clearly succeeded in the comedy business, by any reasonable set of metrics.

And the point of his rant is that the “Middle-class comedy job” is vanishing. It only existed for a brief period — maybe a decade or two — when the economics of the creator economy worked for non-superstars. Now its vanishing, and that sucks, and people ought not pretend otherwise.

Part of what stands out is that this is not at all an AI rant. What he’s talking about is labor conditions. It’s proper Luddism, in the way that Brian Merchant talks about Luddism. (Have you read Merchant’s book. Here’s another rec: read Brian’s book!)

If the only way to make money in comedy is to feed the algorithm, while the companies that control the algorithm scoop out most of the money, and the people who run those companies keep modifying the algorithm to cater to their own whims, then we will be a society where comedy tends toward sucking.

Think of comedy as an indicator for all public art. Journalism too. If successful working comedians can’t make a living while creating a product that audiences really love and flock to, then what sort of shape do you think all other creative industries are going to be in?

We can have nice things. We have had nice things (or at least nicer things) in the past. But we cannot have nice things while leaving the bosses and the billionaires in charge of all the important decisions for society.

I’ve become increasingly convinced that wealth inequality is the defining story of our present moment. Not AI (but also AI, because the trajectory of AI is being defined by the appetites of the billionaire class). Not fascism (but certainly also fascism, since the tech barons have thrown their lot in with the regime and are doing pretty much all they can to bolster it). We allowed too few people to control too much capital, and every category of present-day fuckery is to at least some degree a downstream consequence. (see, just for instance, the WSJ story about a former Chevron executive advising the CIA and Trump about our incursion into Venezuela. There is so much wrong with our foreign policy right now. A good chunk of it is rich-people-thinking-they’re-invincible-geniuses-shaped.)

What brings this up for me this week is this piece from the NYT, “The Scale of Billionaires’ Campaign Donations Is Overwhelming U.S. Politics.”

I think about this a lot, as a political scientist-turned tech critic. Because many tech critics who came up through coding and Silicon Valley don’t have a sense of just how aberrant this level of corporate and billionaire spending is. Yes, companies have always tried to wield power and capture politicians and regulatory agencies. (Iron Triangles was a concept from the 70s.) And, sure, there’s the Powell Memo and the story of the business lobby and all the rest. None of this is new. But the scale? Holy shit let me tell ya.

I participated in campaign finance reform conversations back in the ‘00s. The outsized influence of the wealthy was a real problem then. But it is whiffleball compared to now. In the George W. Bush era, billionaires could bundle contributions from their networks and get up in the single-digit millions if they put some effort into it. Now Elon and the crypto industry and the AI players and every other well-resourced groupchat can drop nine fucking figures? This isn’t the natural state of how-American-government-works. It’s a direct result of the Roberts Supreme Court making policy decisions through jurisprudence. They decided we would have a better democracy if everyone could spend whatever they wanted. It was an obviously terrible decision, with destructive consequences.

And the direct payoff for the billionaire investors is immense. Trump’s regulators are just outright dropping enforcement actions. Crypto billionaires gave millions to Trump, and then Trump’s government let them off the hook for billions in fines. (Don’t get me started on the abuse of the pardon power. My blood pressure is high enough already.)

Democratic lawmakers, meanwhile, are cautious in taking on these industries because they fear the huge spending blitz that is sure to come. I would much prefer Dem lawmakers to be courageous, and I would counsel them that courage is contagious. But that doesn’t mean the fear isn’t warranted. Whoever takes on Kalshi and Polymarket is going to face the most well-funded primary challenge on earth.

Our government has gotten terrible at the basic democratic functions of collecting tax dollars and spending those tax dollars on public goods, because a small group of asshole sociopaths now control what government hears from the public and what the public hears about their government. This is exceedingly difficult to unwind. But it is also abjectly stupid in ways that are difficult to miss.

Via Paul Krugman, a couple charts that further emphasize this point.

Three more readings that are open in my tabs and are worth opening in your tabs too:

The whole essay is great food for thought. But I haven’t had the energy to yell at Sam Altman this week, so I want to thank John for offering the primal heckle-scream that this one deserved.