Raman Achanda ♦️ 🔱

POLITICAL BILLIONAIRES The clip below is a good encapsulation of what modern China is by Eric X. Li, who’s one of the most thoughtful Chinese nationalists. I appreciate his description, because the Internet is the exact opposite. Because on the Internet, capital (in the form of Bitcoin, and more generally smart contracts) really does stand above any given state. The negative way of framing this emerging reality is that Internet capitalists are now above national governments. The positive way of framing it is: anyone can become an Internet capitalist, and there is now truly global rule-of-code that no state can easily abrogate. Moreover, individuals can’t have their digital rights revoked even by powerful states. As for whether it’s bad if “billionaires” have influence over the government…the reality is that political leaders control many billions in assets. For example, a city like SF with ~$16B in annual budget and 11 supervisors plus a mayor essentially has 12 political billionaires. Each of these political billionaires allocates $1B+ per year in cash, on average. This is orders of magnitude more than a typical tech billionaire allocates. That’s because tech billionaires might have $1B in net worth but perhaps only $10-50M liquid. So: market billionaires actually have far less in the way of financial resources than political billionaires. A market billionaire might allocate perhaps $100M over the course of their lifetime, whereas a political billionaire will allocate $1B+ in a single year. This is a >100X differential. Now, yes, it’s true that political billionaires have less for personal consumption than market billionaires do, but that is (almost by definition) societally unimportant. A political billionaire spending a billion on government worker salaries does a lot more to steer the world than a pair of fancy shoes. One might also argue that political budgets are less discretionary than market budgets, and I’d agree, but the sheer scale of public budgets makes up for it. Even if only 1% of a $16B city budget is discretionary, that’s $160M in discretionary cash per year. Anyway, the point is that anyone in control of a giant public budget is already in full billionaire mode. They are allocating billions in capital, so they are political billionaires. You are going to have billionaire-run government in this sense no matter what.