I have made it my mission to give a voice to those who were ignored for too long. I promised that my government would deliver the Hillsborough Law. I’m proud that today we’re making good on that promise.
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Simplifying a bit, the Treasury should introduce a fixed-coupon perpetuity and a fixed-value floating-rate perpetuity. These should gradually make up the bulk of government debt.
The tradeoff between cost of borrowing and how much interest rate risk taxpayers shoulder should be squarely on the shoulders of the politically-accountable Treasury not the independent Fed.
it is simply ridiculous that a ruinously expensive policy can be budget-neutral if the expense consists of wasted time rather than wasted money. But that's still a cost!
One unpopular position I’ve stuck to over the years is that a strong bureaucracy is good. I don’t mean “bureaucracy” as in red tape and regulation; I mean a competent, empowered civil service that can perform crucial government functions efficiently and well using in-house expertise. This is also called state capacity.
Finland made great progress towards eliminating homelessness by giving people houses which they could feel was home. Alas, right-wing government has cut some of the spending and is driving homelessness back up.
The jury is still out on that one: So far there is little evidence for either the massive job losses or the soaring productivity growth industry leaders threatened/promised, but it’s still early days.
Social media is destroying out society. Quitting doesn't help because everyone else is still on it. It's a bad equilibrium. It needs to be solved with government regulations.
that doesn't have to persist long for AI to join the ranks of systems that are important enough that there's someone senior in the government who's responsible for regulating them.
If there really is a high chance of AI leading to the extinction of humanity within years/decades, then the only rational stance towards safety monitoring and research pacing should be stringent, top-down government involvement and universally ratified international treaties.
I do not think those running the government testing understand what is going on, and believe they are reacting basically on vibes and what various trusted people tell them.
The Fascist regime now ruling the US both enables this and has effectively used bogus accusations of "antisemitism" to damage and exert control over prominent institutions they consider to be enemies.
It’s an administration that’s trying to turn us back to the 19th century or before. It’s really just trying to undo even the most essential functions of government.
And this is not something that you can leave up to the private sector. It’s not something where you can do your own research. It’s a very complicated world out there. And the informational burden of trying to figure out whether the people responsible for your package of hamburger are actually following safe procedures, that’s beyond everybody.
This is the case even though Canada gets broad access into the massive American Government Procurement Market, including those of our States. That is not reciprocity, it is a Canadian Trade Scam.
Voting for the AfD in the current landscape, whatever your economic issues, in short, is not a vote to have your economic issues addressed by social democracy, or welfare or government intervention.
Since 2025, MAGA ideologues have been using this alleged plot as an excuse to dismantle government programs, stifle research, intimidate American citizens, and even distort American foreign policy.
Sometimes I get super nervous that someday the US government is really going to fuck with the web. Like they are going to decide they just don't have enough control over it and are going to get really heavy-handed somehow.
So my baseline assumption is that people will continue complaining about the trillions of dollars we have in debt but it won’t lead to a financial crisis.
What we do know is that the actual Elon Musk that we have to live with on this here timeline was flagrantly incompetent in government, contrary to Noah's previous predictions.
I think most high skilled Europeans are happy to pay (even high) taxes That is, if the government does a great job like Singapore or Dubai or Korea or Japan and most things work well You pay the government for a service and you get safe cities, great public services and great healthcare back
The debt dynamics work the same for a central government as they do for a person or a company, except that a central government has a central bank that can print money (which devalues it) and it can take money away from people via taxes.
Early in the final stage of the Big Debt Cycle, the market action reflects this dynamic via interest rates rising led by long-term rates, the currency declining especially relative to gold, and the central government’s treasury department shortening the maturities of its debt offerings because of a shortage of the demand for long-term debt.
Because one can measure these things, one can monitor this debt dynamic happening, so it’s easy to see problems approaching. I’ve used this diagnostic process in my investing and I’ve kept it to myself, but I’m now explaining it in detail in How Countries Go Broke: The Big Cycle because it is too important to keep to myself.
I think it can be a slog, it can be bureaucratic, it can be painful, but when the when the outcome actually happens and you deliver the result, there is no place where you can have a bigger impact on on this country.
I think there is there is um no place where you can work on bigger problems than the US government. Even at the the biggest tech companies in the world, you're never going to be dealing with problems of this of this scale.
no matter what kind of industry you're looking at, there was this government angle where the government's policy actions could be ones that could actually unlock technologies.
Over time that has sort of inverted completely. The private sector plus philanthropy now do about 70% of R&D and the and the government only does about 30.
it's just been sitting there in legislation for like 40 years and no one's really taken advantage of it except for one government program here or there where they want to, you know, do a NASA space reactor or something like that. But it has from a legal perspective been waiting for an administration to say, "Hey, this might be a way to accelerate nuclear R&D."
By the way, this is the pattern in a lot of regulation. It doesn't come from like some well-meaning person trying to keep the public safe. It comes from some entrenched, frankly, lazy interest that doesn't want to have to compete and runs to DC or runs to the local regulator and tries to use the power of government to shut their competition down. I think this is deeply unethical, but it happens all the time.
This gives us a new perspective on why micronations like Sealand don’t work: they start backwards, from the territory and the government, rather than working forwards from a people and their culture.
To shout “temporary” and pull the plug essentially overnight after immigrants have relied on the government’s representations that they should put their efforts and future into establishing a life in the United States wreaks unfair havoc on the lives of immigrants as well as the welfare of their communities.
Government is where the literal money is (money that could often go much further if we fixed what's wrong with government), but it's also where the impact is. And it's where the legitimacy is.
And then in terms of the capital intensive like AI in a factory and also the foundry and then you really need to tap either government funding or some sovereign fund
Just I explained to President Trump, TSMC when they started they have the Taiwan government as a shareholder. If you look at Japan, you look at Singapore, this is the infrastructure US government get to provide the support.
When you break that, when you overthrow the ruler, when you dissolve the republic, when you put in a new thing, it doesn't have that same staying power. And so, it's very common when there's one regime change for there to then be five regime changes rapid-fire over and over.
And soon we have a precedent that every new pope feels he has the authority to knock down every pawn upon the chessboard if he feels like it. Once that is the norm, even a fairly nice pope still inherits the idea that the pope is going to overthrow and replace governments. And this creates a unique instability within Italy that no other part of Europe is subject to
It shouldn't It shouldn't be shelved next to How to Win Friends and Influence People because it's a manual not of how to gain power, but of how to keep power.
The Inquisition, the Vatican, it controls everything, which is completely untrue and is propagandistic. The Inquisition is overseen by a whole bunch of isolated guys who are in isolated towns and it takes weeks or months to even communicate with the Vatican and they're making their own decisions.
And Russia's never had a commerce-driven economy. China much more so under Deng Xiaoping, but recently Xi Jinping has been privileging the crony sector over the private sector and neither one has stable government institutions.
Federal Reserve Board members have often resigned their positions well before their 14-year terms expired, since that's quite a long time to spend in one position in government.
And that is never ever ever the reason. How do I know? Because they already looked at your homepage, read all the stuff, saw what you promised, looked at the pricing page, and decided to buy it.
Back when the Fourth Amendment was enacted, the most fundamental remedy for an unlawful government entry into your home was a civil suit for trespass against the officers.
And there are a whole bunch of people who are employed not always by the government just as much by the private sector who are much more interested in adherence to uh approved procedure than they are in quality of outcome.
One possible reading of the last century or so of political history in China, therefore, is that governments who provide a meritocratic channel for social advancement have legitimacy and popular support, and governments who do not provide one, do not.
That's how you end up in an endless loop of ever-increasing taxes, ever-increasing regulation, which ultimately suffocates free market, free enterprise, and free speech. So, you do want to have very, very strict limitations on the extent the government can increase its powers at the expense of citizens.
No. We designed a system in a way that's impossible. It'll require us to change the system and we won't do that because we made a promise to our users. We would rather shut Telegram down in a certain country than do that.
And I would rather lose everything I have than yield to this pressure because, if you submit to this pressure and agree with something that is fundamentally wrong and violates rights of other people as well, you become broken inside, you become a shell of your former self on a deep biological and spiritual level.
Another big misunderstanding, and a fundamental one, is that people somehow think that the state suppresses the private sector. It’s not at all as simple as that. For the most part, if we look at the local government’s incentive system, they want to help the best, private companies, which are the most promising, because it makes them look good.
So, you while we kind of saved the system a lot, we bailed a lot of people out, they made us pay 5 billion dollars on the more the bad mortgages that Bear Stearns had done. And that's what made me make the statement I wouldn't do it again.
I think there are so many lessons from World War II that could have been brought into the history of the last 30 years, which weren’t, such as if you decapitate an incredibly strong leader, you get a power vacuum. And if you don’t have a solution for that power vacuum, lots of bad elements are going to sweep into that in very quick order, which of course, is exactly what happens in Iraq.
In sum, spurred on by the federal government (in many ways), the US borrowed a huge amount from foreigners at very low rates, and went on a consumption binge. Sooner or later we have to pay it back, or we go though the wrenching adjustment of a debt crisis.
Now that we have the answers, it all looks very obvious, and mostly straightforward.
Their words now
I should have been pointing out red flags starting back at WWDC last year, and I am embarrassed and sorry that I didn’t see what should have been very clear to me from the start.
But the underlying ideology is familiar from Silicon Valley, Mark Zuckerberg's dictum to "move fast and break things" and replace the messily human with frictionless technology, built by elite engineers who are supposed to know better than anyone else.
FLOP is the vector that the government has cared about historically, but the other two vectors are arguably just as important. And especially when we come to this new paradigm, which the world is only just learning about over the last six months: reasoning.
The inflation crisis was caused by massive overspending and escalating energy prices, and that is why today I will also declare a national energy emergency.
After years and years of illegal and unconstitutional federal efforts to restrict free expression, I also will sign an executive order to immediately stop all government censorship and bring back free speech to America.
And so my argument is, that has now opened the door to the presidency of Donald Trump, which is potentially a deeply transformative moment that will change the size and shape of government, that may change our foreign policy profoundly, that may change our immigration policy, that may change the demographics of our country, all of that, and my thesis is that that's all been made possible by inflation.
This is the global race of our lives. Now, some countries are going to make AI breakthroughs and export them… Others will end up buying those breakthroughs and importing them. The question is – which of those will Britain be? AI maker or AI taker?
Stabilizing factors such as the global demand for U.S. dollars and debt denominated in its own currency suggest an era of fiscal dominance in the U.S. that's less dramatic than alarmists predict but more persistent and intractable than optimists hope.
Waymo now has a service that looks and feels like this in San Francisco, 8 years earlier than I predicted. But it is not what every one was expecting. There are humans in the loop.
We cannot say that we are free if we allow our government to dictate to us what experiences we may or may not have in our inner consciousness, while doing no harm to others.
It means that anything you offer must fit in 1h per month. That is it. And if
it does not, if it needs more involvement than that, we, as maintainers, will
not do it. At all.
So having an independently owned powerful platform is very important for truth, for free speech, for hearing the other side of the story, for counterbalancing the power of the government.
The trouble with Xi Jinping is that he is 60 percent correct on all the problems he sees, while his government’s brute force solutions reliably worsen things.
I promised myself a long time ago that if I saw a book that interested me I’d never let time or money or anything else prevent me from having it. This means that I treat reading with a certain amount of respect.
I am myself skeptical that there is a clearly defined notion of who “the right people” might be, and thus I am on public choice grounds far more skeptical of government than Keynes was.
Now, finally, the Court has resolved the question: the First Amendment requires that, at a minimum, the government prove that a speaker was reckless about whether their statement would be interpreted as threatening.
It’s not exactly news that the American government’s support for biofuels increases food prices, intensifies global hunger and wastes taxpayer dollars.
Chris Miller tells us the history of how microchips were developed, emphasizing the critical role of the government, and especially defense procurement.
The analysis in
this chapter has shown that there is no such thing as a universal threshold over
which debt becomes unsustainable, and that the relevant debt level depends
on many factors, in particular the real interest rate on debt.
The proposition is that the cancellation of the bonds held by the central bank would decrease the amount of interest payments and thus the debt service of governments. And indeed, it would. But it would have another effect—namely, to decrease the revenues of the central bank and thus the profits that the central bank turns in to the government. This second effect would be exactly of the same size as the first, and the net effect on the government budget constraint would be equal to zero.
A longer maturity of debt protects the government from a temporary increase in the short run interest rate, and it gives it more time to adjust to a permanent increase.
It has displayed a stronger record of reform than any other developing country, as the leadership keeps pulling off politically-difficult tasks: shrinking the state sector, re-orienting the economy towards export-led growth after WTO accession, and so on.
Rather: NSO’s genius is that they’ve done something that attackers were never incentivized to do in this past: democratize access to exploit technology.
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