The political philosophy motivating Musk | Hacker News Reader

The political philosophy motivating Musk

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14 pointsdoener16 comments

Calling it a political philosophy feels too generous. It essentially boils down to "I am very smart and so should be unilaterally in charge of everything". As the article says, this kind of thinking is more a product of late-night college dorm room discussions than any kind of coherent, internally consistent ideology about how a society should function.

Not rendering for me. Try:

https://archive.ph/cr0Xr

See also, for more background:

Reboot' Revealed: Elon Musk's CEO-Dictator Playbook [0]

Silicon Valley Whistleblowers Warn Elon Musk ‘Hijacking’ Republicans to Control Entire US Government [1]

PDF of their document: [2]

[0] https://www.thenerdreich.com/reboot-elon-musk-ceo-dictator-d...

[1] https://bylinetimes.com/2025/02/07/silicon-valley-whistleblo...

[2] https://america2.news/content/files/2025/02/Musk-NRx-Memo-Fe...

(33 page PDF, link and document checked.)

One trick I use is to install uMatrix (on Firefox or derivatives), and disable all scripts for that site. I originally couldn't get it to scroll down, but after disabling scripts it was fine.

It's hard to argue with the observation that government really blocks progress in so many directions. Sometimes for noble causes like preventing inequality or environmental abuse, but those are usually eventually hijacked by bad actors anyway (example: introduce regulations that make it very hard to build renewable energy - out of care for the environment and health of course, such as dead birds and infrasound noise from windmills - and thus convince society that there's no alternative to oil and gas).

People who get shit done - there are still some left - are naturally annoyed by it. It shouldn't be a surprise that if they acquire wealth and power, they will try to actually do something about it.

The problem with "people who get shit done" lies in the people themselves. Are they level headed and honest? Are the impulsive and deceptive? These things matter.

Also, "getting shit done" doesn't have intrinsic positive value, and infact it is problematic when the shit in question is "really stupid shit".

If a business fails, that is ultimately of little significance in the context of a country or the world. If a country fails, that is very significant in the context of that country and potentially the world.

I’m very attracted to a literate argument therewith. But first we need to talk about the most important facet: this is not about fantasy (JD Vance can live in fantasy), this is about lying.

Elon Musk said that the government risks bankruptcy if we fail to submit to his ideas. Obviously, manipulatively untrue. Trump relies on lying for even more control than that.

So to keep smart people interested in the conversation, let’s add a crutch: the lies are load-bearing members of the outward facade. The true intentions are too easily misunderstood by a hazily observing public. Let’s presume the internal conversations are closer to high-order dystopian sci-fi.

Indeed. The idea that the US government can go bankrupt is ludicrous on its face (and illegal; see Fourteenth Amendment, Section 4). I can go bankrupt, Musk can go bankrupt, but the US government simply cannot. It is a sovereign issuer of its own currency. Anyone who makes this claim should not be trusted, as either a liar with an agenda or an ignorant, and ideally should not be allowed anywhere near fiscal policy. So yes, this is about lying to allow the oligarchs to hijack the people's government from them. The ultimate regulatory capture, if you will.

Well, the point where continuing to incur obligations with no chance of ever repaying them (resulting in escalating interest rates as investors price it in more and more), will become untenable, may arrive. What if debt reaches 200% of GDP? 500%? What kind of interest rate may be required to issue more of it - and issuing more of it is necessary to repay old ones? It may keep debt escalating at a rate that might seem silly and cause an avalanche effect whereas issuing more debt requires paying a higher and higher interest rate - and that interest will cause the debt to self-escalate - in a runaway cycle where process has to end in a year or two with inevitable default.

Only good thing about it is that many other countries will arrive to that point sooner thus keeping U.S. in advantageous position still.

Imagine looking at the whole of human history and saying modern western civilization is where we got the least shit done.

How should we rank the contributions of governments when it comes to progress (the imposition of order measured by institutional improvement) and defense (collective cultural self-preservation in the face of aggressive neighbors)?

This is better deployed against the viewpoint that makes the affirmative statement about democracy leading to stagnation. Cheers.

I think it's a big big question - how is democracy related to growth rates.

Certainly democracy is a necessary, but not the sufficient, precondition for growth of capital. Because capital is ownership. In a dictatorship, a dictator/"the Party" eventually decides as they please, so no ownership is "real". Being rich is about physically controlling things rather than nominally "owning" them. In this sense, dictatorships suck. As a consequence, they also suck at keeping human capital in because those want to get rich so they move to where it's possible.

But in other measures, it's really hard to see whether democracy or a dictatorship is a better tool for economic development. I think it greatly depends on stage of development of a particular country, and stage of technology development worldwide. Say, India suffered poor growth rates historically and was progressively falling behind China (starting with per-capita equality in 1990 down to about 40% of Chinese level a few years ago), because it was too democratic: if many children in the country go hungry every day, taking some money for industrial investments means that some children will die. No democratic country will vote for that, and no free market will "vote" for that with people's cash. But a dictatorship can do it, no problem. Once society becomes more advanced, dictatorship becomes an impediment because it limits free expression, knowledge exchange, travel, and limits capital ownership just because of the stuff above. But then, we may encounter further issues like those we have in Western societies where NIMBYsm can just simply choke the entire society by literally ban any new construction because the incumbents don't want values of their homes to fall - and that might give dictatorships an edge because they don't give a damn what people think.

I don't think anyone has an answer there. Dictatorship or democracy, in the end of the day, depend on culture, religion, and the like, not on economic factors. A rather "clean" experiment in that regard with the fall of the Soviet Union did not give us any answer: some democratic countries jumped ahead (Baltic states), some fell way behind (Ukraine, Moldova), some dictatorship became successful (Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan), others fell into utter dystopia (Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan).

In a society where "people who get shit done" are totally unconstrained, how do we ensure the right people are doing the right shit? I think you're making an assumption is that "shit getting done" is by definition progress, but I see no reason that would have to be the case especially absent any controls on what's being done. It might qualify as movement, but movement by definition can be in any direction.

College libertarian complaints about government aside, democratic societies actually have a pretty good track record of progress compared to the alternatives that came before them. There are undoubtedly cases where legitimate progress was slowed by democracy, but if you remove democracy entirely, how do you have any assurance it's those cases that would be accelerated. Like maybe we'll get to Mars faster or invent unlimited fusion energy without representative government. But maybe we'll revert to tribal feudalism because every oligarch will think they're the man of destiny and try to make it so.

Progress is not linear. Not every step is an advancement. It's possible for an entire field, and entire society to get lost en route to something nominally superior—or even to be led, by hucksters, into the weeds.

But the especially tedious misconception you're espousing is the myth of the Randian hero. This model of "people who get shit done" obscures collective labor contributions, and romanticizes individual exceptionalism, while dismissing interdependence and systemic support structures.

These special, few, "solitary geniuses" do not exist. What we have are plutocrats born into a privileged position and shameless enough to wield that privilege without democratic oversight or consensus.

Such people truly get only "shit" done.

> The philosophy argues that democracy inherently leads to social decline, because of the development of deep state bureaucracies that are unable to control oligarchic forces

This must by why all of the billionaires are trying to disassemble the civil services, to save us from oligarchy.

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