Pasha Kamyshev explains how to fix America in one week:
The big misunderstanding at the root of America’s issues is that it still believes itself to be “primarily a market economy.” Roughly speaking, this is simply false. If I were being generous, I would call America half a market economy and half a state economy, but in reality, the state portion is higher.
To understand the magnitude of the state economy, we can look no further than the share of GDP that is spent by the government (40%) as well as the national debt, which is rapidly approaching $40 trillion.
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Some people got that money, and it flowed into their bank accounts. Some of these people who get money from the government are quite rich. I am going to call them “state oligarchs,” who are different from “market oligarchs.”
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The key insight you need to grasp is that as a collective, the “state oligarchs” benefit from higher taxes, even if those taxes predominantly fall on the “rich.” While it may sound counter-intuitive at first why some rich people would advocate for “higher taxes,” consider this: if you are a defense contractor or a healthcare provider who gets 100% of their revenue from the government, then raising taxes gives the government MORE money to pay you, even after you take into account your own tax bill.
In the words of finance, someone is a “state oligarch” when they are “net long” taxation. This puts them in sharp conflict with “market oligarchs,” who are “net short” taxation.
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The bigger the state taxation, the more regressive the movement from the consumer to the state oligarchs, the higher the perceived and the real inequality, the higher the demand for more redistribution, which feeds the problem.
Yes, the class struggle of 2026 is between financial oligarchs and pork barrel oligarchs.
“if you are a defense contractor or a healthcare provider who gets 100% of their revenue from the government, then raising taxes gives the government MORE money to pay you, even after you take into account your own tax bill”…reminds me of my old post Paying Higher Taxes Can be Very Profitable
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/59624.html
Back from 1930s, as Garet Garrett noted in The Revolution Was. https://mises.org/mises-daily/revolution-was
Bruce says:
But then, the “financial” sector is in large part built in or around banks. Which are Bagehotian banks, thus by now all in fact are state banks — as Moldbug put it, the “lender of last resort” might as well be the lender of first resort, they are but middlemen between the client and treasury (plus printer).
Thus, both Team Shearing and Team Pork are in the state sector.