Are Tech Billionaires Complete, Delusional Idiots?
Does a bear shit in the woods?
There is an epidemic in the U.S. right now of tech billionaires who think they know what’s best for the nation. They think democracy is an antiquated idea, and instead prefer some sort of tech-libertarian state, what they call the network state.
Elon Musk is one of these tech billionaires, and right now he’s running roughshod over the government, taking his chainsaw to government agencies left and right, either eviscerating the workforce or eviscerating the entire agency.
But Musk is not the only one of this breed. There are many others, all living in a delusional state, thinking technology is the answer to all our problems, and that only they, as the self-proclaimed geniuses they think they are, can lead us out of the wilderness and to our eternal salvation.
They believe democracy is getting in the way of this tech-libertarian utopia. And they are currently pushing through with this agenda, as the liberal democratic order and the global economy is being torn to shreds. All in service to what Curtis Yarvin, the tech-philosopher who is considered the intellectual force behind these tech billionaires, calls the dark enlightenment.
These ideas have their seeds in the ideas of free market economists like Milton Friedman, who is considered one of the catalysts for the ideas of neoliberalism and trickle-down economics, ideas that Ronald Reagan put into action when he was president
Friedman believed democracy got in the way of capitalism, saying in 1988, “There is evidence that a democratic society, once established, destroys a free economy.”
Milton Friedman’s economic colleagues were all united by the belief that capitalism had to be protected from democracy. One said democracy “has gone wrong and that it is a system where the whole is equal to the scum of its parts.”
Another Friedman acolyte, Stephen Moore, who served as Donald Trump’s chief economic advisor during Trump’s first term, said “capitalism is a lot more important than democracy. I’m not even a big believer in democracy.”
The views of these economists, once fringe, have found a mainstream audience, and is the inspiration for the tech billionaires. Peter Thiel, one of the leaders of the tech-libertarians, famously said “I believe freedom and democracy are not compatible.”
Furthermore, Thiel thinks giving the right to vote to women was a bad idea. He said, “Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women—two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians—have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.”
And so, this libertarian dream of getting rid of democracy is what propels them, as they make plans for a network state, which are nation or city-states ruled by tech corporations, totally outside U.S. laws—in other words, regions without democracy and without the government rules and regulations they detest.
As these people dream on, philosophizing and theorizing to their hearts content about their utopian, or to be more precise, dystopian vision, the question is, has this approach ever be done in the U.S.?
The answer is yes, and it turned out to be unintentionally run by bears.
It all began in 2004, with something called the Free Town Project in Grafton, New Hampshire. It was a movement to recruit libertarians from across the country to move to Grafton, in order to take over the town government and turn Grafton into a libertarian paradise—by getting rid of every rule, regulation and tax expense they could, in order to realize their dream of a perfectly logical and perfectly market-based community.
In this small town of Grafton, NH, they achieved their goals and took over the town government. They immediately got to work and voted in changes, including a 30% reduction in the town's already small budget.
This resulted in eliminating funding to the county's senior-citizens council, town offices going unheated during the winter, poorly maintained roads filled with potholes, and the Grafton Police Department being reduced to one officer (the police chief), who said he was unable to answer calls for service as the town had no money to repair the one police vehicle left.
Other issues were inconsistent basic public services, such as trash collection.
The libertarians weren’t successful with meeting all their goals. They tried unsuccessfully to withdraw from the school district, to completely discontinue paying for road repairs, and to declare Grafton a United Nations free zone.
But they successfully put a stranglehold on things like police services, road services, fire services, and even the public library. All of these were cut to the bone.
And from there, things went really downhill. Recycling rates went down. Neighbor complaints went up. The town’s legal costs went up because they were constantly defending themselves from lawsuits from the libertarians. The number of sex offenders living in the town went up. The number of recorded crimes went up. The town had never had a murder in living memory, and it had its first two, a double homicide, over a roommate dispute.
And the town couldn’t address these issues with a robust police force, because they had the one full-time police officer, a single police chief after all the budget cuts, and he had to stand up at town meetings and tell people that he couldn’t put his cruiser on the road for a period of weeks because he didn’t have money to repair it and make it a safe vehicle.
Basically, Grafton became a Wild West, frontier-type town.
Because it was pretty much anything goes, people started living in the woods, because there were no ordinances against it. And in doing so, they dealt with their food and waste in their own way.
The bears in the area started taking notice of this, because the libertarians were just throwing their waste out how they wanted. They didn’t want the government to tell them how to manage their potential bear attractants.
The bears starting running amok and things got messy, as there was no way for the town to deal with it. Some people were shooting the bears. Some were feeding the bears. Some were setting booby traps on their properties in an effort to deter the bears through pain. Others were throwing firecrackers at them. Others were putting cayenne pepper on their garbage so that when the bears sniffed their garbage, they would get a snout full of pepper.
These were black bears, which tend to be non-aggressive towards humans. But as they were being attacked, they got more aggressive. They aggressively raided food and became less likely to run away when a human showed up.
It culminated in 2012, when there was a black bear attack in Grafton. That might not seem that unusual, but New Hampshire had not had a black bear attack for at least 100 years leading up to that. And now in Grafton, a woman was attacked in her home by a black bear.
After that, there were a few more bear attacks.
By 2016, the libertarian free nation of Grafton, NH was no more. The locals had enough of the libertarians and took back their town by winning the majority of seats in the local elections on the town board.
The lesson of this is libertarians are complete, delusional idiots. They think that if you give a libertarian a magic wand and allow them to transform society the way they want to, it would turn the area into a paradise; the truth instead is that society would break down into pure chaos, as Grafton did.
Although I’m sure the bears of Grafton were sad to see the libertarians go.
The tech billionaires/tech libertarians think they can create some idyllic, utopian nation-state run by technology and corporations—they currently are trying to do that to the U.S., but the reality is that they’re instead creating a shitshow that will take some time to repair.
There is a hard wall of reality that exists that’s going to foil any effort to implement libertarianism on a broad scale. And the tech libertarians might have to learn that the hard way, once the bears start shitting all over their Teslas and Porsches and BMWs.
The future they want to create will look not that much different from the so-called libertarian paradise of Grafton, NY, replete with bears gone wild. It will be lawless and pure chaos. And they will not know what to do to fix it, because all they know how to do is pontificate and theorize about the Garden of Eden hellscape they wish to create.
The sooner we stop letting tech billionaires, the self-proclaimed geniuses of idiocy, have their hand in the government, the better off we’ll all be. Except for the bears, who will lament all the free food they had access to.
There is a solution to ridding ourselves of the scourge of tech billionaires: a wealth tax, or returning the marginal tax rate to the levels of the 1950s and 1960s, when the wealthy were paying a tax rate of 80-90% on their incomes.
It was near impossible to be a billionaire back then. Society was better off for that fact; in addition, we didn’t have to deal with people who proclaimed themselves geniuses because they were able to amass so much money while at the same time putting a wrecking ball to humanity.