# Disrupt the Government

Nov 4, 2023

I watched this video about South Africa and it clarified the plan.

You disrupt the government by providing 10x better versions of all of the services that it provides.

The key thing the government is supposed to be able to do is infrastructure. Most of the wealth that we give to the US government no longer goes into that, such that even if you are building decentralized versions, you may be able to outcompete the government.

Crypto, and almost everything decentralized, is terrible compared to what centralized alternatives could be. Decentralized stuff is inefficient and harder to build. However, if the people running the centralized stuff are too bad of scammers, the decentralized stuff can outcompete it.

Money: Government policy has resulted in a $129 trillion dollar wealth transfer from the young to the old. This is over 5x the US GDP. The national debt is $33T. They control the printers and use them as they see fit. The largest thing the governement spends money on is a big ponzi scheme.

Energy: Energy use per capita in the US has been stagnant since 1971. In San Diego, I’m paying 43c/kWh of power.

Protection: The crime/murder rate is the same as it was in the 50s, spiking in the 60s/70s/80s and returning in the 90s. Recently it’s been trending upward.

Education: Education spending has increased with nothing to show for it. Much of how the government thinks about education seems to just be wrong.

Healthcare: Health spending per person in the U.S. was nearly two times higher than in the closest country, Germany, and four times higher than in South Korea.

The US government failed somewhere around 1971, the failure is just less visible because the starting place was pretty high. Similar to Google in 2010. When an organization can no longer deliver growth, it has failed.

People with bullshit jobs spend their full time justifying and keeping those jobs, the government has done the same. Wasting trillions to justify its existence. Stealing money from some to bribe others to keep it around. It’s a huge tax on our society with nothing to show for it, and is a major preventer of growth.

Armed revolution is unlikely to get you what you want. Counterintuitively, trying it will prolong the government. Eventually, the democracy will collapse and we will get a dictator similar to Russia. The question is what society will look like at that point. Hopefully society will have very little reliance on the government, such that the resulting dictator will be weak and ineffectual.

Money: Crypto needs to focus on replacing practical daily use of the financial system. Build Triangle, a Square clone that actually uses crypto. Transaction counts these systems can handle need to rise. Merchants will use Triangle to not pay 3% to the credit card companies. People will use it due to anti bank sentiment. Push it in local neighborhoods. However, it must be 100% as convenient as a credit card. People don’t really care about the couple percent or the credit card rewards, they care about convenience first and feeling good second.

Energy: Solar is looking really positive here. That South Africa video talks about how everyone who can afford it is getting private solar installations. We need to continue to drive prices down and convenience up. Would it be possible at a neighborhood level to have a private grid? The existing monopoly companies need to be cut out slowly.

Protection: AI should be able to make great progress here. An intelligent home security system. Privacy in public is stupid. There’s only so many criminals, why aren’t we tracking them all in a public database. Why aren’t we tracking everyone in a public database? You do understand the government and large corporations are tracking you, why should only they have the privilege?

Education/Healthcare: Most of the existing systems here are total rackets. It’s not that building something better is hard, it’s that the current systems are entrenched in people’s minds even though they do very little. People are very bad at tracking outcomes here; the only challenge is introducing better outcome tracking.

It’s funny how many of these Elon is working on. He’s probably way ahead of me on thinking through this stuff. I’ve been in favor of an Elon monarchy for a while vs the existing system. Despite some issues, we will have cheap power and space colonies.

Monarchy is good, but even better: Can you build a high trust decentralized society?