FBXL Social

Arguably totalitarianism is the present.

In spite of a veneer of liberalism, the government has more control over our lives and the world at Large than ever before. In many western liberal democratic countries the percent of GDP that represents government overwhelms the entire private economy. Much of that remaining so-called private economy is just crony capitalism -- the richest people on the planet all have strong ties to the government. People are pissed off at Elon Musk for buying twitter, but no one seems to remember that he's entire Fortune is based on government Payola -- his cars for years were built in a factory he was given for free and every one highly subsided both directly and indirectly, and the other part of his fortune is SpaceX which is almost exclusively government.

In 1900, the government made up 5 to 10% of GDP in most of these countries and most of them didn't even have an income tax. Today, blue collar workers can hit a 50% marginal tax rate, and in some countries over 60% of GDP is the government.

With examples such as the credit card companies silencing viewpoints the government doesn't like, or up in Canada the federal government directly ordering Banks to remove people's ability to use money, that's a level of authoritarianism that most authoritarian regimes throughout history didn't reach.

Part of the way that the veneer of liberalism can be maintained is because in the past authoritarian governments tended to be somewhat masculine and used direct coercive Force, whereas today authoritarianism tends to make more use of indirect methods and GSR, such as during the pandemic when the federal governments other than Trudeau's, didn't directly silence anyone from saying things that they didn't like, but they did end up exercising direct control over academia to end up making it appear that there was a consensus that didn't necessarily exist, and ended up using messaging campaigns to paint anyone who wasn't doing what they wanted as in opposition to civilized society which turned neighbors into the agents of the state, through active rallying which led to acts of shaming.

While it may appear that feminine authoritarianism is not authoritarianism, anyone who has lived under the iron fist wrapped in a velvet glove knows full well it is just as bad.

One of the reasons that I pick on Elon is that many on the left want to use him as an example of private wealth being abused, while they ignore the fact that it was policies that they enacted that made him immensely wealthy. An overwhelming amount of his money came from selling crappy electric cars and government spacecraft paired with Federal reserve policy which cranked up the stock market to fund the massive government they wanted.

If I was a rich like him I can't say I'd do much different than he has.