I'm not some sort of hyper-individualist, but god damn I agree with these points. I think people should be allowed to be as individualistic as they want. That means firearms, personal freedoms, as long as they aren't harming anybody they should go wild.
You can't even collect fucking rainwater in many places in the West. Fuck that. Everything I want to do is illegal and that is gay.
Our regulators overregulate what private individuals do on our own land, and they underregulate what giant corporations do on theirs. The reason is simple; oligarchs pay for the privileges that they want for themselves, while curtailing the rights of everyone outside the oligarch class. Modern-day liberals think that government is a check on corporate power. It manifestly is not. Regulatory capture and revolving-door hires have seen to that.
When you talk about regulatory capture and revolving-door hires, most people's eyes just sort of glaze over like they don't know what you're talking about, and their brainwashing kicks in.
I'll give you a couple examples. One is Carmen Segarra talking about her experiences as a Fed regulator:
The public doesn't seem to understand just how dysfunctional our financial regulatory system is, Michael Lewis writes. That may change today with a radio report from "This American Life."
web.archive.org
The job right from the start seems to have been different from what she had imagined: In meetings, Fed employees would defer to the Goldman people; if one of the Goldman people said something revealing or even alarming, the other Fed employees in the meeting would either ignore or downplay it. For instance, in one meeting a Goldman employee expressed the view that "once clients are wealthy enough certain consumer laws don't apply to them." After that meeting, Segarra turned to a fellow Fed regulator and said how surprised she was by that statement -- to which the regulator replied, "You didn't hear that."
I'll never forget this paragraph. It has been stuck in my head for years at this point. "Once you're rich enough, the law literally doesn't apply to you." Now tell us something we don't know.
Another example is Google's revolving door with government back in the day.
New data reveal extent of traffic between Google and the Obama administration
www.techtransparencyproject.org
- 53 revolving door moves between Google and the White House. Those involved 22 former White House officials who left the administration to work for Google, and 31 Google executives (or from Google's main outside firms) who joined the White House, or were appointed to federal advisory boards.
- 28 revolving door moves between Google and government positions involving national security, intelligence or the Department of Defense. Seven former national security and intelligence officials and 18 Pentagon officials moved to Google; while three Google executives moved to DoD.
- 23 revolving door moves between Google and the State Department during the Obama administration. Eighteen former State Department officials joined Google, while five Google officials took up senior posts at the State Department.
I remember showing these stats to people on SB back in the day and they just categorically rejected the very idea that Alphabet and the gubmint were awarding cozy sinecures to each other's people during the Obama administration. Their programming wouldn't allow for them to accept this, because surely,
government is a check on the power of big business.
Nonsense. Our government is run by PACs, by crooked billionaire fauxlanthropists, and by kickbacks, cronyism, and revolving-door ass-pats. Any regulation that does happen usually happens to those too poor and isolated to defend themselves from it.
