5 Comments

“It almost seems like they want us to.”

I agree. It’s like women want you to pass their shit tests. These feminine folk need to probe for weaknesses like they need to eat and sleep, it’s just their nature. They will put up a fuss when you put your foot down but you can just do things.

Expand full comment

This author has a very small number of subscribers, a shame because he weilds a big stick, really, quite brilliant.

A quote from my boy Curtis Yarvin, Gray Mirror Substack:

“Leftism is essentially criminal in nature”

Here’s a real peach:

“ so you ask your priest: if not God, king and church what would I believe? Who is against God and king and church? And your priest said: Satan.

So thinking logically you became a Satanist . This probably happened to you, but it wasn’t a priest but a guidance counselor. The way the world works, never changes.

“EXIT” is a beginning that will help us return from whence we came. I find it very heartening that this goodly fellow believes we can take it back.

Expand full comment

The biggest challenge is that people will think “we are winning” and go back to trusting the gov’t to do everything for them.

The bureaucracy will either actively resist behind the scenes or just do nothing and wait for the tide to turn. Elon probably won’t be able to impact that very much.

I’ve been in projects where the State outsourced the employees and services to a vendor. We couldn’t change the mindset of the former state employees. After the next election the contract was cancelled and they went back to being state employees.

Keep exiting and building!

Expand full comment

> But we can get a lot done with (just) post-deportation home prices,

I've gotten a lot of flak for this in other comments sections but I am pretty confident in the fact that deportations will not _meaningfully_ increase under Trump.

I have a lot of people around me on both sides of the aisle insisting that Trump is going to deport 11 million illegals. My left friends horrified and my right friends excited. There is no way this is going to happen. 11 million people is a lot of people. The scale of that alone makes it effectively impossible, even if we had martial law dictatorship and no legal process, we lack the manpower and logistical capacity to physically carry it out. Not to mention, 2nd amendment works both ways. If even 1% of them shoot back, there's almost as many of them armed as there are US soldiers capable of being deployed to respond.

As for home prices, much less confident in this, but I am extremely skeptical that, if 11 million illegals were deported, home prices would fall. A few reasons:

1) Most of the illegals aren't buying houses, and so their economic action isn't changing the price of housing. They're either getting government subsidized housing, or living with legal friends/family who will not be deported.

(Note: There is probably higher order effects of real estate distortion from that government spending, perhaps I am underestimating the effect of removing it)

2) Housing is not expensive. _Land_ is expensive, housing is cheap. And the reason why land is expensive is, well, a lot of reasons but one of the biggest one is for bougie white people to secure a place in a "good" school district. I don't need to tell you all what that means, you already know. The things that make a school district "bad" are US citizens and cannot be deported

3) A dynamic frequently ignored by everyone: Every time a city government does something to quote "maintain and increase property values", this literally means make housing more expensive. And since a majority of Americans own property in every city (some only by a thin margin, but they are still a majority), they all always vote for these things, because it personally benefits them. This makes house prices go up. Nobody ever actually wants to make house prices go down, because most regular Americans have a large chunk of their net worth tied up in their house, so if house price goes down, they lose lots of money.

The only way to make the cost of _housing_ go down while the value of _property_ keeps going up is to densify housing on a given plot of land. This is unlikely to work. Partly, because most of the land that would need to densify is owned by the people living on it and they (very reasonably) do not want others living on their land. And partly, because, well, America can't have dense housing because it is unwilling or unable to enforce quality of life against the issues that dense housing brings. Further, these kinds of policies make _certain kinds_ of housing cheaper but they sure don't make _single family homes_ cheaper, which is what most people want.

The reality is, housing is cheap in this country. Housing _in locations people want to live_ is expensive, and the factors that make that expensive are not going to reverse in any short period of time, if ever.

Expand full comment

> Of course, to prevent these new cities from immediately going the way of the old, President Trump would have to restore freedom of association and repeal the 1964 Constitution — which may be too much to hope (though I believe, if he really meant it, he would have all the support he would need.)

I disagree, although I may be miscalibrated. People, even now, still fundamentally believe, in their heart of hearts, in Unicorn Governance (https://fee.org/articles/unicorn-governance/).

I have walked through the whole "Civil Rights Act broke everything" reasoning with my Trumpy conservative friends, and they are in agreement with me every step of the argument. But as soon as I get to "and all of this stems from these specific elements of the Civil Rights Act and until they're removed, the problem is impossible", they will immediately short-circuit to 'what, so black people don't deserve rights?'. They can follow every nuanced detail of the reasoning but as soon as you give a government name to the cause, they throw out all understanding and their thinking starts and ends with "but it's called the _Civil Rights_ act. Are you against civil rights?"

I have yet to figure out a way to break through this, but I imagine similar constraints apply to everyone: There is a thing called "Civil Rights Act" and it doesn't matter what it is or what it does, it simply must be protected as a symbol, no matter the cost

The only way I can see your statement being true is if I'm dramatically overestimating "all the support he would need". Perhaps, in reality, ten people could use legal maneuvering to force it through and, once it was through, the same "but it's called X" blind spot reasoning would work to reinforce it.

Expand full comment