"Instead of the new Washington Post influencing the right, then, we may find that abundance agenda types on the left have a powerful new ally against the populists and socialists on their own side."
I'm skeptical of those who'd seek to take individuals out of the driver's seat and stick them with riding the bus -- who'd have people give up the dream of a house and a yard, packing them into high-density apartments -- and who pass that off as "abundance."
I'm not sure I trust these folks as allies. My misgivings -- and my viewpoint -- can be found in the manifestos of the KKK: Kerouac, Kesey, and Kafka.
Maybe the rich conservatives aren't into free markets [it's bad business].....and certainly the conservative politicians never have been. But real people...real working people with real jobs and real small businesses....have been screaming FREE MARKETS for decades....it is good business for them.....the problem is -- that's all they have is their screams.
Global free markets are for NAFTA and the CATO institute….that is not a MAGA free market….you are right. MAGA, and myself, don't give a crap about the USA keeping those alive and well at the expense of American jobs. But -- both can happen…using tariffs as leverage.
“MAGA free market” lol. The free market is one of the key aspects that have made America the best country to ever exist. And now the right who previously championed free markets turn against them. Such a shame.
Reason and Cato both have lots of good libertarian posts the focus primarily but not exclusively on economic and spending issues. They just never make waves on social media because there's very little audience for non-rage bait libertarian perspectives. People don't share CATO or Reason posts, and worse, they don't even get outraged at CATO or Reason posts.
Agree about (b). I proposed an improved comment system to the editor in chief - she was decidedly uninterested in improving it. A shame and wasted opportunity.
Interesting article. While Tate getting out of Romania is disturbing Trump and Musk are disrupting in places that need it. The corruption was so deep that only a seismic shaking will do. The USAID funded OCCRP that was working for regime change in our own country and other anti Trump activities with tax payer’s money. Extreme situations require extreme measures to fix.
I used to avoid anyone who was claimed to be a conspiracy theorist but now I have since seen it so over used as a tool to shut people’s voice down. Now it intrigues me. A long tract record of malfeasance and false accusation? Please send more because I read him frequently. The TWITTER FILES changed my trust forever in my government and the Democrats. They have betrayed me as a liberal.
Shellenberger is a conspiracy theorist who has a long track record of accusing people of espionage and other malfeasance, often with no evidence whatsoever. Here's a particularly embarrassing instance when he confused two people with similar names. This information was easily verifiable and any serious investigation would not have made this error. You should not believe anything that comes out of his "investigations."
Hanania highlights a hard truth: A high-quality, right-leaning media property committed to truth wouldn’t necessarily serve the current administration’s interests.
This article is simply a scream for the old days of good solid newspapers and solid TV networks....with a wide variety of content that was put together with large amounts of advertising money....and subscribers and/or viewers.
The lied to us since I can remember. So we left them. They got what they deserve.
Media isn't suffering because "they lied to us." They're suffering because Craigslist and Facebook destroyed their business models. That's the entire story. Editorial lean is like 5% of the total at most.
Lying is much more profitable than the truth. How do I know? Because Fox News was willing to pay $787 million in order to continue lying to its audience about the 2020 election.
Yep. Tech, particularly those of us in ad tech, has been discussing and debating the evolution of the publishing industry for two decades now. The key insight is that traditional publishers lost their key revenue streams from advertising, including classified ads, as more of this business moved online. Even national publications and TV news lost substantial revenue as major advertisers moved spend online.
For anyone looking to read about this, I'd recommend Ben Thompson’s analysis of how the local newspaper market developed and was subsequently disrupted in “The Local News Business Model”, https://stratechery.com/2017/the-local-news-business-model/
I think you are a little too harsh on DOGE. Elon Musk is definitely doing this media strategy of tweeting all sorts of stupid stuff constantly. But the actions just seem like exactly how you should go about doing layoffs at a large corporation in a situation where many of the middle managers are opposed to the layoffs, and unions rules limit your ability to fire precisely who you want.
In the tech industry at least I have spoken with a number of smart people with management experience who think DOGE is promising. So, at least don’t consider it to be something 100% stupid like the antivax sentiment. There is some chance we look back at DOGE and say, ah, despite all the noise chaos and broken things, it did improve the way the federal workforce runs.
As one of the few libertarian/conservative critics of Musk, it would be great if you could write a post with specifics of how you think he's gone "crazy". For sure he's fallen for some viral foolishness but that's some distance from "crazy". As a fan of Musk and his politics (I read him as following Milei's playbook), I'd like to hear your view.
(At one time I tried to follow Musk's posts on X, but he's too prolific - I don't have the time.)
Separately - only the editorial pages of the WSJ belong in that quadrant - it's reporting is mainstream (left). And Fox (TV) is not high quality in any sense.
Are you serious? Just look at his feed. Follow the links in this article. Look at how he’s consistently community noted on his own website. It would be like explaining what’s wrong with Alex Jones or Catturd at this point. If you can’t see it I can’t make it clearer.
As I added in an edit, I stopped reading his X posts. There are just too damn many of them. I don't have the temporal luxury of spending all day online. Supposedly Grok thinks Elon is crazy too (per Zvi); I'll go ask Grok to summarize.
Also, not only X, but his statements on the budget, what he has chosen to focus on, are not connected to reality. The media has done a lot of factchecks on the claims of what DOGE has done and what they claim is possible.
I think you're discounting FAR too much. Plenty of fact checks are differences of opinion, but you can't just turn off your brain and ignore them completely.
Pointing out that DOGE's public "receipts" are triple-counting savings, counting an $8M contract as $8B, or counting cutting a $560k project to mark your gender as "X" for the SSA as cutting the entire $232M IT contract it was a piece of is not a difference of opinion. (And note that DOGE deleted those "receipts" from their website after this was pointed out, while also increasing their total estimated savings without explanation or corresponding "receipts.")
Someone tells you they're saving $100. You ask how, and they present a "wall of receipts" that shows how they've reduced spending by $30, saying "it's just a partial list." You look at the top 5 items on the list, which amount to $15, and they're riddled with accounting errors that mean the actual dollar amount is closer to 50 cents. They say "whoops, my bad, I'll delete those receipts. Also btw - now I've increased my estimate of total savings to $150."
Do you trust that they're making a good-faith effort to reduce savings or to report their results?
No, I don't think they're focusing on reporting results accurately and I agree there are lots of mistakes in what has been reported. They're a team of like 20 people attempting to reform the entire executive branch of the federal government. This is an immense task, and if I were in their shoes I'd focus more on getting the job done and less on the politics and PR too.
And I agree that some fact checking is real and that there have been (and will be) many mistaken reports from DOGE and Musk. My general attitude toward factchecking is well expressed by David Friedman in his recent post: https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/lessons-for-the-next-plague ("Untrusted Science" section).
Musk recently posted on X: "We are increasingly optimistic that, as the immense waste & fraud are eliminated from Social Security & Medical that there is potential to increase actual dollars receive by citizens and better healthcare!"
Let's walk through this.
- he's repeatedly stated that the US is on the path to bankruptcy and we need to eliminate the deficit.
- for both claims to be true, he needs to believe that there's enough "waste & fraud" in Social Security and "Medical" (Medicare/Medicaid, presumably?) to eliminate the deficit with room left over to actually increase payments.
- about $3.3T goes to these programs in total
- the budget deficit is $1.8T
So Musk is claiming that at least 55% of total spending on Social Security and Medicaid/Medicare is waste and fraud. I think this is clearly crazy. And worse, this mostly confuses his own side and makes actual deficit reduction less likely rather than more likely as people focus on deficit reduction ideas that don't actually have a big impact on the deficit.
"We are increasingly optimistic that, as the immense waste & fraud are eliminated from Social Security & Medical that there is potential to increase actual dollars receive by citizens and better healthcare!"
If you tell me "I'm trying desperately to improve my finances because I spend $1800 more than I earn each month. I'm on the path to bankruptcy! I've looked into it though, and I'm increasingly optimistic that if I just stop buying potatoes, there's potential to actually *increase* my spending on avocados."
We talk a bit and I find that your total spending on food is $3300 per month.
I think it's reasonable for me to say that either:
- you are lying about how important it is to you to improve your finances, or
- you think you are spending at least somewhere in the realm of $1800 on potatoes.
Maybe I went a bit too far - we can just say that Musk thinks that wiping out waste and fraud would take care of a "significant portion" of the deficit, rather than all of it. Maybe we'd be fine if our deficit was reduced by 50% but still present.
Then the claim is that over 27.5% of entitlement spending is waste and fraud. Still seems pretty wild to me!
Given that you have backed down some, I will back off.
I don’t deny Musk’s implicit, and occasionally explicit, claims about how much waste/fraud/abuse can be found are overbroad.
But making overbroad claims in the other direction - as you did and still are doing - is not the way to get the point across you *seem* to want to make.
Others making similar critiques, of course, merely are leftists who want to discourage the entire enterprise and use any claim they can to get back political power.
I was giving you the benefit of the doubt that was not your intention. I could of course be wrong there.
I can easily believe 10 or 20% of SS is fraud, and administration costs ought to be approximately zero (a program cuts checks once a month); if they're more than that, that's waste.
Re healthcare, US healthcare costs are inflated ridiculously because of the effect of near universal insurance on prices - if nobody pays out of pocket, nobody cares how much anything costs. If that were dealt with (let us fervently hope...it's a huge job), we could easily afford more and better healthcare for 50% of the money.
We'd have to remove the tax advantage for employer-paid healthcare (or extend it to personally-paid healthcare).
John has already made an excellent response but I just want to add that sending administrative costs to zero is not compatible with eliminating fraud among beneficiaries. Why don't we send policing costs to zero while eliminating crime while we're at it?
I'm not familiar with the details of how SS administration works. If it's simple (as it ought to be) and basically boils down to "send monthly checks to every citizen over age X", admin costs should be approximately zero. All you have to do is check that the recipient is (a) a citizen, (b) alive, and (c) of sufficient age. All of which seem automatable (esp. with AI). $2.5B/year is a lot to do that, tho as I said above it's already 0.17% of the SS costs so even getting it to 1/10th that isn't going to make much real difference.
Policing is very labor intensive. Cutting checks isn't.
This is an absurd oversimplification. You can apply for social security early or late, which changes the amount you get. The amount is different based on your work history - e.g. if you've never worked, you don't get any social security. The SSA also handles SSDI (social security disability insurance) which means evaluating medical evidence, work history, and disability severity. Survivors of workers can claim benefits, so those claims need to be evaluated. Maintaining the database of workers and their work history, communicate with states, etc. None of this comes for free.
And look into typical costs for payroll firms! You're going to find that they typically charge 1-2% of total payroll. This is the case as close to your simplified version of reality as you're going to get: here's a list of names, bank info, and addresses - just send the money on a regular basis. Social Security has economies of scale, but moving giant chunks of money to
It's an oversimplification, yes. That's kind of the point - the system is expensive to run because it's complex. In ways that it doesn't need to be.
I run a small company with my wife, about 60 people. The payroll service charges on the order of 0.1% of the payroll. And they do A LOT more calculations for that price - all kinds of taxes, social security, health insurance deductions, IRAs, overtime, dealing with both the fed and state taxes...
Administration absolutely includes making sure that the applications are not fraudulent. Remember that births and deaths are done by the states, and they do not communicate well with the federal government. Administration pays for where and how people apply for it, and the ancillary programs (death benefits, etc).
In general, this is the sort of sloppy thinking that gets us DOGE. Lacking a detailed model of how the world works, you think it can just “go to zero”. No, it can’t.
Sometimes it's hard to see the forest because of all the trees in the way. The 50k foot viewpoint is largely correct - those in the trenches fighting the daily battles find it hard to see how much of what they're doing is fundamentally unnecessary (because with current practices it *is* necessary, but we can change the practices). [Compare: Boeing vs SpaceX. Twitter vs X.]
It is obviously not that simple if you think just a little bit. Not everyone is enrolled in Social Security. People start getting payments at different ages. You don't know who is a citizen for sure. Etc. - this is always what happens when you start implementing a "simple" software system. If they want to redesign social security itself, it is a different story, but this is not what they are doing.
Ok, so SS is $1.5T a year, 20% gets us $300B. Administration costs are $2.5B, let's throw all of that in to get us to ~$303B.
Then we assume that in talking about "eliminating fraud & waste," Elon's not just talking about making government more efficient, but also somehow fixing the medical industry. Cool, all medical costs go down by 50%.
That's $903B, a total of $1.203T. That's still about $600B away from fixing the deficit. This is assuming you're completely right about your estimates (20% seems incredibly high to me, the SSA has in fact looked into deceased or very old recipients of SS and estimates around $3B a year in improper payments, so you're claiming that they're off by a factor of 100) and throwing "fixing the medical industry" into DOGE's purview, and we're STILL not able to both pay off the deficit and send people more money.
I'm sorry, this is just unreasonable. It's not what a serious person would focus on, or the way a serious person would focus on it.
(Of course, Elon has clearly been incredibly effective in the past. He's started several hugely successful companies, SpaceX alone would be an incredible achievement. But to me, it seems like lately his brain has been colonized by moronic right wing memes, and I say this as someone who's pretty hard right both culturally and economically. I'd be thrilled if he or someone really were running the Milei playbook, but I don't think he is.)
$2.5B/$1.5T is 0.17% so that's effectively zero (as it should be). If we can cut the $2.5B (probably) so much the better but that doesn't change the numbers significantly. Yes, if you want to deal with Medicaid/Medicare you have to fix the healthcare industry. There is no other way. So I assume that's what Musk means. Musk has accomplished not one but many "impossible" things in the past (usually late, but eventually), and what he's attempting now does not seem physically impossible. So I assume, in the absence of hard evidence otherwise, that he'll accomplish this. If he's permitted to.
Again, let's just accept all that: social security fraud is 20% and medical costs can be reduced by 50%. Elon can do it, I believe it!
The problem is I'm still not getting to a balanced budget, but a $600B deficit. Is my math wrong?
But say we get there, we now have a $600B deficit, and Musk proposes "hey, you know what's important right now? We should increase entitlement spending. Let's increase social security payments by X% and increase the deficit from $600B to $[more]B."
Would you share that priority? Or do you think Elon believes that we can actually save *more* than your estimates?
No, I wouldn't support that. What Musk actually believes, I've no idea except that if he says that I suppose he thinks budget-positive is a possibility. I do think if Musk was really let loose he could cut enough to get the budget positive.
Even if that happened, I *still* wouldn't support more handouts (I'd rather cut taxes).
But I can see how it could be politically expedient to do so (of course). Politics is famously the "art of the possible"; compromises need to be made.
As Rocky the Flying Squirrel used to say, "that trick *never* works".
Economics 101.
You'd be better off just nationalizing the entire healthcare system and have all providers work for the government. It would work better than price controls. (Not well, but better.)
Yes, I do. I'm far from alone in believing that US healthcare costs are high because virtually all healthcare in the US is paid for via insurance. Unlike single-payer systems (as in Europe), there is no rationing of healthcare in the US. Nobody ever says "that's enough - you're too old to be worth investing that much in".
When people don't pay for things out of pocket, they (of course) want the best money can buy - as long as it's not their money. So everything gets gold-plated, every conceivable test is run regardless of cost, etc. And healthcare providers realize they have no incentive to control costs.
This wasn't a problem before WW2, when Congress decided to make employer-paid health insurance tax-free (but not privately purchased health insurance). Once that was passed (as a sop to labor unions who were unhappy with wartime wage controls), only fools bought insurance or paid for healthcare with their own money. Instead employers paid for the insurance to take advantage of the tax break (it is bought with untaxed pay). That's how we got the idiotic connection between employment and health insurance - lose one, you lose the other.
Before that, most healthcare was bought out of pocket. Many people had insurance but only for catastrophic health events (== very high deductibles) like getting cancer. Since most care was bought by people out of pocket, they cared how much it cost and there was price pressure on providers. Once insurance started paying, no more price pressure - insurers don't care, the more it costs the more they raise premiums and their cut increases.
The alternatives to the current (idiotic) system are (1) single-payer care, as is common in Europe. This works but effectively the state rations care - there's an annual budget and when the money runs out, no more care. So they prioritize the young and cheaply cured. Or, (2) go back to a truly private system where most care is paid for by patients directly, with insurance only for exceptionally expensive procedures (a heart transplant....). When most patients spend their own money, they care about value and price, and providers face price pressure like everyone else who sells things. Not like now.
This all a pretty standard economic analysis of how we got into this mess.
I don't think people turned on Musk or Trump because of the lying, they were rejected because they signalled red tribe membership and only at that point did they realise they could lie without anyone caring. RFK lying about vaccines and election fraud in Ohio in 2004 was seen as largely acceptable in the blue tribe.
The best illustration is that Trump lying about Mexican crime rates in the US and JD Vance telling the truth about Afghan crime rates in Germany get a similar angry response from media organs despite one being backed up by data and the other being debunked.
May a liberal offer a comment? Bezos has already kissed the ring by dropping the Kamala Harris endorsement. The only difference is that from now on the kissing will be more frequent and more audible.
You don't like Kamala? Well, fine, but, tell me, on Jan. 6, 2025, when Kamala Harris was counting the electoral votes in the front of the Senate, did she award herself the presidency? Did she say that widespread fraud invalidated the results for Pennsylvania, and Texas, and Florida, and therefore she was elected? I don't recall that happening.
Trump is not just some wacky guy who goes off the rails from time to time. Conservatives need to stop pretending that Trump is "normal", or at least "normalish". We have entered a very distinct break in American history. Our Constitution is no longer operational. John Roberts has shown that he will trash the Constitution in toto rather than risk a direct confrontation with Trump. There is no going back to the way things were.
There will be, almost inevitably, a "Democratic Trump". a Democratic Marius to Trump's Sulla. (Yes, I got the chronology wrong. All you classicists out there can suffer.) After that, one can hope, a new "synthesis", which will probably be known as the "Second Republic". Because Trump has put the first one in the ashcan of history.
“It just doesn’t seem like we’re in a good place when one side of the political spectrum simply can’t be reasoned with…”
…and of course Richard is cluelessly claiming this is the right, rather than the left. 🙄
[you could say both and I wouldn’t argue that position.]
This piece is classic Richard - interesting, 85% correct, but insisting on throwing in inflexible, dogmatic wrong stuff.
Now that said, I agree with his main thesis here: Bezos moving WaPo to be pro free markets is an excellent thing. And a BIG. FREAKING. DEAL. if actually executed.
This would not make it “conservative”, but merely 1990s-Dem centrist. And I’d be fine with that. And agree it would be a good thing for the country.
In fairness, this piece might be 90% correct, because most of the other “The Media is Basically Honest and Good” crap he usually spouts on this topic is largely missing, replaced by the merely debatable claim of “high quality” for the left-biased MSM.
Hmmm - maybe Richard *is* learning and becoming a bit less inflexibly dogmatic…
Now if we could just get him to stop defending midwit leftism as “Elite Human Capital”, and asserting that right-of-center is “the stupid party” just because some fraction of those who prefer those politics have low human capital. Call me a dreamer…
I am glad that Bezos is changing course, but he has owned the Post for a dozen years already and in that time the Opinions section has been as completely batshit insane as anything on Twitter.
I'd add The Dispatch as fairly high-quality and conservative. Maybe also limited in scope, but they have serious articles on politics and economics. I have nowhere close to an informed opinion, but I'd guess they have greater reach than Free Press and Free Beacon.
The Dispatch is just resistance focused and not widely read. As for a free minds and markets (kudos to Bezos for borrowing their tagline), the oldest and most read site/magazine is Reason.com, surprised it wasn’t mentioned but I guess it’s always hard to decide if libertarian is considered conservative or not.
Despite being moderately insightful, I don't think you understand Musk that well. He is in fact smarter than he may appear. Look at Musk's use of Twitter, for example.
Less successful people, like me, use the Internet and social media as a way to expend their energy and attention. Moderately successful people, like you, use social media to both expend and to draw attention, and to interact with others in a somewhat give-and-take fashion.
While Musk does spend attention on social media, above all he draws it. He is extremely successful at this. Gaining control over Twitter and promoting his posts allowed him to gain unprecedented attention from millions of people. This helped him to extremely quickly gain power as a close advisor to the President of the United States. It has also worked out financially; despite at first losing money on Twitter, his net worth has massively increased. No doubt his celebrity status is a major contributor to this success.
In general, I think Musk's innovative use of information technology is one of the most interesting things about him. For example, there's his attempt to use email to circumvent the normal reporting hierarchy of the United States federal government. I understand that this is a strategy he already uses at his own companies. In essence, this is a new organizational form that is enabled by direct digital communication. 20 years ago, it was not possible to efficiently communicate directly with so many people. Using this new possibility allows him to expand his own personal reach and influence. He can be personally involved in every aspect of the company.
While this organizational form may have business benefits, the most important benefit is social. Social life is largely driven by the human desire to please others and to avoid displeasing them. The strength of this desire depends on the frequency and directness with which two people have contact. Elon Musk has unprecedentedly frequent and direct contact with his employees, giving him an unprecedented social significance at every level of his companies. He has a social significance that he wouldn't have if he were simply a CEO in a distant boardroom.
Musk is now applying this same strategy in an attempt to gain unprecedented social significance at all levels of American and world society as a whole. Up until now, he has been incredibly successful. I expect this success to continue.
"Instead of the new Washington Post influencing the right, then, we may find that abundance agenda types on the left have a powerful new ally against the populists and socialists on their own side."
Inshallah
I'm skeptical of those who'd seek to take individuals out of the driver's seat and stick them with riding the bus -- who'd have people give up the dream of a house and a yard, packing them into high-density apartments -- and who pass that off as "abundance."
I'm not sure I trust these folks as allies. My misgivings -- and my viewpoint -- can be found in the manifestos of the KKK: Kerouac, Kesey, and Kafka.
Conservatives haven't been much into free markets for some time.
Maybe the rich conservatives aren't into free markets [it's bad business].....and certainly the conservative politicians never have been. But real people...real working people with real jobs and real small businesses....have been screaming FREE MARKETS for decades....it is good business for them.....the problem is -- that's all they have is their screams.
Most "real working people" who are conservatives are now MAGA and MAGA is so far from free markets.
Global free markets are for NAFTA and the CATO institute….that is not a MAGA free market….you are right. MAGA, and myself, don't give a crap about the USA keeping those alive and well at the expense of American jobs. But -- both can happen…using tariffs as leverage.
“MAGA free market” lol. The free market is one of the key aspects that have made America the best country to ever exist. And now the right who previously championed free markets turn against them. Such a shame.
Reason and Cato both have lots of good libertarian posts the focus primarily but not exclusively on economic and spending issues. They just never make waves on social media because there's very little audience for non-rage bait libertarian perspectives. People don't share CATO or Reason posts, and worse, they don't even get outraged at CATO or Reason posts.
I was a Reason paying subscriber for some years. Had to give it up because
(a) in amongst the thoughtful well-written articles would inevitably be one that took purist libertarianism over into self-parody; and
(b) the reader comments kept making me feel like I was swimming in a cesspool.
Point (b) gives me some empathy with what Richard Hanania has been working through regarding today's mainstream American conservatism.
Agree about (b). I proposed an improved comment system to the editor in chief - she was decidedly uninterested in improving it. A shame and wasted opportunity.
Read the comments on a Reason article. It's full of crackpots.
I agree. Libertarianism is right-coded enough that they should be added to Quadrant (I).
Interesting article. While Tate getting out of Romania is disturbing Trump and Musk are disrupting in places that need it. The corruption was so deep that only a seismic shaking will do. The USAID funded OCCRP that was working for regime change in our own country and other anti Trump activities with tax payer’s money. Extreme situations require extreme measures to fix.
I used to avoid anyone who was claimed to be a conspiracy theorist but now I have since seen it so over used as a tool to shut people’s voice down. Now it intrigues me. A long tract record of malfeasance and false accusation? Please send more because I read him frequently. The TWITTER FILES changed my trust forever in my government and the Democrats. They have betrayed me as a liberal.
Michael Shellenberger via Public. He is the best journalist in this nation. That is for starters.
Shellenberger is a conspiracy theorist who has a long track record of accusing people of espionage and other malfeasance, often with no evidence whatsoever. Here's a particularly embarrassing instance when he confused two people with similar names. This information was easily verifiable and any serious investigation would not have made this error. You should not believe anything that comes out of his "investigations."
https://substack.com/home/post/p-151622091
Hanania highlights a hard truth: A high-quality, right-leaning media property committed to truth wouldn’t necessarily serve the current administration’s interests.
This article is simply a scream for the old days of good solid newspapers and solid TV networks....with a wide variety of content that was put together with large amounts of advertising money....and subscribers and/or viewers.
The lied to us since I can remember. So we left them. They got what they deserve.
Media isn't suffering because "they lied to us." They're suffering because Craigslist and Facebook destroyed their business models. That's the entire story. Editorial lean is like 5% of the total at most.
Lying is much more profitable than the truth. How do I know? Because Fox News was willing to pay $787 million in order to continue lying to its audience about the 2020 election.
Yep. Tech, particularly those of us in ad tech, has been discussing and debating the evolution of the publishing industry for two decades now. The key insight is that traditional publishers lost their key revenue streams from advertising, including classified ads, as more of this business moved online. Even national publications and TV news lost substantial revenue as major advertisers moved spend online.
For anyone looking to read about this, I'd recommend Ben Thompson’s analysis of how the local newspaper market developed and was subsequently disrupted in “The Local News Business Model”, https://stratechery.com/2017/the-local-news-business-model/
*Edited to fix typos
I think you are a little too harsh on DOGE. Elon Musk is definitely doing this media strategy of tweeting all sorts of stupid stuff constantly. But the actions just seem like exactly how you should go about doing layoffs at a large corporation in a situation where many of the middle managers are opposed to the layoffs, and unions rules limit your ability to fire precisely who you want.
In the tech industry at least I have spoken with a number of smart people with management experience who think DOGE is promising. So, at least don’t consider it to be something 100% stupid like the antivax sentiment. There is some chance we look back at DOGE and say, ah, despite all the noise chaos and broken things, it did improve the way the federal workforce runs.
https://doge.gov/
Looks like how tech bros would do it, yes.
As one of the few libertarian/conservative critics of Musk, it would be great if you could write a post with specifics of how you think he's gone "crazy". For sure he's fallen for some viral foolishness but that's some distance from "crazy". As a fan of Musk and his politics (I read him as following Milei's playbook), I'd like to hear your view.
(At one time I tried to follow Musk's posts on X, but he's too prolific - I don't have the time.)
Separately - only the editorial pages of the WSJ belong in that quadrant - it's reporting is mainstream (left). And Fox (TV) is not high quality in any sense.
Are you serious? Just look at his feed. Follow the links in this article. Look at how he’s consistently community noted on his own website. It would be like explaining what’s wrong with Alex Jones or Catturd at this point. If you can’t see it I can’t make it clearer.
As I added in an edit, I stopped reading his X posts. There are just too damn many of them. I don't have the temporal luxury of spending all day online. Supposedly Grok thinks Elon is crazy too (per Zvi); I'll go ask Grok to summarize.
Also, not only X, but his statements on the budget, what he has chosen to focus on, are not connected to reality. The media has done a lot of factchecks on the claims of what DOGE has done and what they claim is possible.
Perhaps I'm the one who's gone crazy, but I discount media "factchecking" by approximately 100%. They are just a measure of difference of opinion.
FWIW, here's Grok's view; which hasn't changed my mind about Musk - he has always shot from the hip (remember "pedo guy"?):
https://x.com/i/grok/share/bADDy7oLRwgbXk5sYvKvcHwf9
I think you're discounting FAR too much. Plenty of fact checks are differences of opinion, but you can't just turn off your brain and ignore them completely.
Pointing out that DOGE's public "receipts" are triple-counting savings, counting an $8M contract as $8B, or counting cutting a $560k project to mark your gender as "X" for the SSA as cutting the entire $232M IT contract it was a piece of is not a difference of opinion. (And note that DOGE deleted those "receipts" from their website after this was pointed out, while also increasing their total estimated savings without explanation or corresponding "receipts.")
Someone tells you they're saving $100. You ask how, and they present a "wall of receipts" that shows how they've reduced spending by $30, saying "it's just a partial list." You look at the top 5 items on the list, which amount to $15, and they're riddled with accounting errors that mean the actual dollar amount is closer to 50 cents. They say "whoops, my bad, I'll delete those receipts. Also btw - now I've increased my estimate of total savings to $150."
Do you trust that they're making a good-faith effort to reduce savings or to report their results?
No, I don't think they're focusing on reporting results accurately and I agree there are lots of mistakes in what has been reported. They're a team of like 20 people attempting to reform the entire executive branch of the federal government. This is an immense task, and if I were in their shoes I'd focus more on getting the job done and less on the politics and PR too.
And I agree that some fact checking is real and that there have been (and will be) many mistaken reports from DOGE and Musk. My general attitude toward factchecking is well expressed by David Friedman in his recent post: https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/lessons-for-the-next-plague ("Untrusted Science" section).
Musk recently posted on X: "We are increasingly optimistic that, as the immense waste & fraud are eliminated from Social Security & Medical that there is potential to increase actual dollars receive by citizens and better healthcare!"
Let's walk through this.
- he's repeatedly stated that the US is on the path to bankruptcy and we need to eliminate the deficit.
- for both claims to be true, he needs to believe that there's enough "waste & fraud" in Social Security and "Medical" (Medicare/Medicaid, presumably?) to eliminate the deficit with room left over to actually increase payments.
- about $3.3T goes to these programs in total
- the budget deficit is $1.8T
So Musk is claiming that at least 55% of total spending on Social Security and Medicaid/Medicare is waste and fraud. I think this is clearly crazy. And worse, this mostly confuses his own side and makes actual deficit reduction less likely rather than more likely as people focus on deficit reduction ideas that don't actually have a big impact on the deficit.
Please state exactly where you came up with YOUR absurd 55% claim that you attribute to Musk?
I ain’t defending all of what Musk has spit out, but your claim is not backed up by anything in terms of what Musk has claimed.
The budget deficit is $1.8T, and the total cost of SS + Medicare + Medicaid is $3.3T.
1.8T is 55% of 3.3T.
That’s not an answer. Where exactly did Musk claim that eliminating waste and fraud in entitlements alone would wipe out the deficit?
You cannot get that from anything else plus a claim that the U.S. needs to eliminate the annual deficit.
"We are increasingly optimistic that, as the immense waste & fraud are eliminated from Social Security & Medical that there is potential to increase actual dollars receive by citizens and better healthcare!"
If you tell me "I'm trying desperately to improve my finances because I spend $1800 more than I earn each month. I'm on the path to bankruptcy! I've looked into it though, and I'm increasingly optimistic that if I just stop buying potatoes, there's potential to actually *increase* my spending on avocados."
We talk a bit and I find that your total spending on food is $3300 per month.
I think it's reasonable for me to say that either:
- you are lying about how important it is to you to improve your finances, or
- you think you are spending at least somewhere in the realm of $1800 on potatoes.
Maybe I went a bit too far - we can just say that Musk thinks that wiping out waste and fraud would take care of a "significant portion" of the deficit, rather than all of it. Maybe we'd be fine if our deficit was reduced by 50% but still present.
Then the claim is that over 27.5% of entitlement spending is waste and fraud. Still seems pretty wild to me!
Ok.
Given that you have backed down some, I will back off.
I don’t deny Musk’s implicit, and occasionally explicit, claims about how much waste/fraud/abuse can be found are overbroad.
But making overbroad claims in the other direction - as you did and still are doing - is not the way to get the point across you *seem* to want to make.
Others making similar critiques, of course, merely are leftists who want to discourage the entire enterprise and use any claim they can to get back political power.
I was giving you the benefit of the doubt that was not your intention. I could of course be wrong there.
I can easily believe 10 or 20% of SS is fraud, and administration costs ought to be approximately zero (a program cuts checks once a month); if they're more than that, that's waste.
Re healthcare, US healthcare costs are inflated ridiculously because of the effect of near universal insurance on prices - if nobody pays out of pocket, nobody cares how much anything costs. If that were dealt with (let us fervently hope...it's a huge job), we could easily afford more and better healthcare for 50% of the money.
We'd have to remove the tax advantage for employer-paid healthcare (or extend it to personally-paid healthcare).
John has already made an excellent response but I just want to add that sending administrative costs to zero is not compatible with eliminating fraud among beneficiaries. Why don't we send policing costs to zero while eliminating crime while we're at it?
I'm not familiar with the details of how SS administration works. If it's simple (as it ought to be) and basically boils down to "send monthly checks to every citizen over age X", admin costs should be approximately zero. All you have to do is check that the recipient is (a) a citizen, (b) alive, and (c) of sufficient age. All of which seem automatable (esp. with AI). $2.5B/year is a lot to do that, tho as I said above it's already 0.17% of the SS costs so even getting it to 1/10th that isn't going to make much real difference.
Policing is very labor intensive. Cutting checks isn't.
> send monthly checks to every citizen over age X
This is an absurd oversimplification. You can apply for social security early or late, which changes the amount you get. The amount is different based on your work history - e.g. if you've never worked, you don't get any social security. The SSA also handles SSDI (social security disability insurance) which means evaluating medical evidence, work history, and disability severity. Survivors of workers can claim benefits, so those claims need to be evaluated. Maintaining the database of workers and their work history, communicate with states, etc. None of this comes for free.
And look into typical costs for payroll firms! You're going to find that they typically charge 1-2% of total payroll. This is the case as close to your simplified version of reality as you're going to get: here's a list of names, bank info, and addresses - just send the money on a regular basis. Social Security has economies of scale, but moving giant chunks of money to
It's an oversimplification, yes. That's kind of the point - the system is expensive to run because it's complex. In ways that it doesn't need to be.
I run a small company with my wife, about 60 people. The payroll service charges on the order of 0.1% of the payroll. And they do A LOT more calculations for that price - all kinds of taxes, social security, health insurance deductions, IRAs, overtime, dealing with both the fed and state taxes...
Administration absolutely includes making sure that the applications are not fraudulent. Remember that births and deaths are done by the states, and they do not communicate well with the federal government. Administration pays for where and how people apply for it, and the ancillary programs (death benefits, etc).
In general, this is the sort of sloppy thinking that gets us DOGE. Lacking a detailed model of how the world works, you think it can just “go to zero”. No, it can’t.
Sometimes it's hard to see the forest because of all the trees in the way. The 50k foot viewpoint is largely correct - those in the trenches fighting the daily battles find it hard to see how much of what they're doing is fundamentally unnecessary (because with current practices it *is* necessary, but we can change the practices). [Compare: Boeing vs SpaceX. Twitter vs X.]
It is obviously not that simple if you think just a little bit. Not everyone is enrolled in Social Security. People start getting payments at different ages. You don't know who is a citizen for sure. Etc. - this is always what happens when you start implementing a "simple" software system. If they want to redesign social security itself, it is a different story, but this is not what they are doing.
I wouldn't be so sure that's not what they're (at least trying) to do.
The way to make things cheaper to administer is to simplify the underlying system.
But per John's numbers (see below), admin costs are 0.17% of SS spending now (at $2.5B/year), so that's not the main problem anyway.
Ok, so SS is $1.5T a year, 20% gets us $300B. Administration costs are $2.5B, let's throw all of that in to get us to ~$303B.
Then we assume that in talking about "eliminating fraud & waste," Elon's not just talking about making government more efficient, but also somehow fixing the medical industry. Cool, all medical costs go down by 50%.
That's $903B, a total of $1.203T. That's still about $600B away from fixing the deficit. This is assuming you're completely right about your estimates (20% seems incredibly high to me, the SSA has in fact looked into deceased or very old recipients of SS and estimates around $3B a year in improper payments, so you're claiming that they're off by a factor of 100) and throwing "fixing the medical industry" into DOGE's purview, and we're STILL not able to both pay off the deficit and send people more money.
I'm sorry, this is just unreasonable. It's not what a serious person would focus on, or the way a serious person would focus on it.
(Of course, Elon has clearly been incredibly effective in the past. He's started several hugely successful companies, SpaceX alone would be an incredible achievement. But to me, it seems like lately his brain has been colonized by moronic right wing memes, and I say this as someone who's pretty hard right both culturally and economically. I'd be thrilled if he or someone really were running the Milei playbook, but I don't think he is.)
$2.5B/$1.5T is 0.17% so that's effectively zero (as it should be). If we can cut the $2.5B (probably) so much the better but that doesn't change the numbers significantly. Yes, if you want to deal with Medicaid/Medicare you have to fix the healthcare industry. There is no other way. So I assume that's what Musk means. Musk has accomplished not one but many "impossible" things in the past (usually late, but eventually), and what he's attempting now does not seem physically impossible. So I assume, in the absence of hard evidence otherwise, that he'll accomplish this. If he's permitted to.
Again, let's just accept all that: social security fraud is 20% and medical costs can be reduced by 50%. Elon can do it, I believe it!
The problem is I'm still not getting to a balanced budget, but a $600B deficit. Is my math wrong?
But say we get there, we now have a $600B deficit, and Musk proposes "hey, you know what's important right now? We should increase entitlement spending. Let's increase social security payments by X% and increase the deficit from $600B to $[more]B."
Would you share that priority? Or do you think Elon believes that we can actually save *more* than your estimates?
No, I wouldn't support that. What Musk actually believes, I've no idea except that if he says that I suppose he thinks budget-positive is a possibility. I do think if Musk was really let loose he could cut enough to get the budget positive.
Even if that happened, I *still* wouldn't support more handouts (I'd rather cut taxes).
But I can see how it could be politically expedient to do so (of course). Politics is famously the "art of the possible"; compromises need to be made.
Healthcare needs price controls.
Minimum prices or maximum prices?
Price caps create shortages.
Price minimums create oversupply.
As Rocky the Flying Squirrel used to say, "that trick *never* works".
Economics 101.
You'd be better off just nationalizing the entire healthcare system and have all providers work for the government. It would work better than price controls. (Not well, but better.)
Yes, I do. I'm far from alone in believing that US healthcare costs are high because virtually all healthcare in the US is paid for via insurance. Unlike single-payer systems (as in Europe), there is no rationing of healthcare in the US. Nobody ever says "that's enough - you're too old to be worth investing that much in".
When people don't pay for things out of pocket, they (of course) want the best money can buy - as long as it's not their money. So everything gets gold-plated, every conceivable test is run regardless of cost, etc. And healthcare providers realize they have no incentive to control costs.
This wasn't a problem before WW2, when Congress decided to make employer-paid health insurance tax-free (but not privately purchased health insurance). Once that was passed (as a sop to labor unions who were unhappy with wartime wage controls), only fools bought insurance or paid for healthcare with their own money. Instead employers paid for the insurance to take advantage of the tax break (it is bought with untaxed pay). That's how we got the idiotic connection between employment and health insurance - lose one, you lose the other.
Before that, most healthcare was bought out of pocket. Many people had insurance but only for catastrophic health events (== very high deductibles) like getting cancer. Since most care was bought by people out of pocket, they cared how much it cost and there was price pressure on providers. Once insurance started paying, no more price pressure - insurers don't care, the more it costs the more they raise premiums and their cut increases.
The alternatives to the current (idiotic) system are (1) single-payer care, as is common in Europe. This works but effectively the state rations care - there's an annual budget and when the money runs out, no more care. So they prioritize the young and cheaply cured. Or, (2) go back to a truly private system where most care is paid for by patients directly, with insurance only for exceptionally expensive procedures (a heart transplant....). When most patients spend their own money, they care about value and price, and providers face price pressure like everyone else who sells things. Not like now.
This all a pretty standard economic analysis of how we got into this mess.
I don't think people turned on Musk or Trump because of the lying, they were rejected because they signalled red tribe membership and only at that point did they realise they could lie without anyone caring. RFK lying about vaccines and election fraud in Ohio in 2004 was seen as largely acceptable in the blue tribe.
The best illustration is that Trump lying about Mexican crime rates in the US and JD Vance telling the truth about Afghan crime rates in Germany get a similar angry response from media organs despite one being backed up by data and the other being debunked.
May a liberal offer a comment? Bezos has already kissed the ring by dropping the Kamala Harris endorsement. The only difference is that from now on the kissing will be more frequent and more audible.
You don't like Kamala? Well, fine, but, tell me, on Jan. 6, 2025, when Kamala Harris was counting the electoral votes in the front of the Senate, did she award herself the presidency? Did she say that widespread fraud invalidated the results for Pennsylvania, and Texas, and Florida, and therefore she was elected? I don't recall that happening.
Trump is not just some wacky guy who goes off the rails from time to time. Conservatives need to stop pretending that Trump is "normal", or at least "normalish". We have entered a very distinct break in American history. Our Constitution is no longer operational. John Roberts has shown that he will trash the Constitution in toto rather than risk a direct confrontation with Trump. There is no going back to the way things were.
There will be, almost inevitably, a "Democratic Trump". a Democratic Marius to Trump's Sulla. (Yes, I got the chronology wrong. All you classicists out there can suffer.) After that, one can hope, a new "synthesis", which will probably be known as the "Second Republic". Because Trump has put the first one in the ashcan of history.
“It just doesn’t seem like we’re in a good place when one side of the political spectrum simply can’t be reasoned with…”
…and of course Richard is cluelessly claiming this is the right, rather than the left. 🙄
[you could say both and I wouldn’t argue that position.]
This piece is classic Richard - interesting, 85% correct, but insisting on throwing in inflexible, dogmatic wrong stuff.
Now that said, I agree with his main thesis here: Bezos moving WaPo to be pro free markets is an excellent thing. And a BIG. FREAKING. DEAL. if actually executed.
This would not make it “conservative”, but merely 1990s-Dem centrist. And I’d be fine with that. And agree it would be a good thing for the country.
In fairness, this piece might be 90% correct, because most of the other “The Media is Basically Honest and Good” crap he usually spouts on this topic is largely missing, replaced by the merely debatable claim of “high quality” for the left-biased MSM.
Hmmm - maybe Richard *is* learning and becoming a bit less inflexibly dogmatic…
Now if we could just get him to stop defending midwit leftism as “Elite Human Capital”, and asserting that right-of-center is “the stupid party” just because some fraction of those who prefer those politics have low human capital. Call me a dreamer…
I am glad that Bezos is changing course, but he has owned the Post for a dozen years already and in that time the Opinions section has been as completely batshit insane as anything on Twitter.
Richard casually ignoring the platfrom he is producing the content
I'd add The Dispatch as fairly high-quality and conservative. Maybe also limited in scope, but they have serious articles on politics and economics. I have nowhere close to an informed opinion, but I'd guess they have greater reach than Free Press and Free Beacon.
The Dispatch is just resistance focused and not widely read. As for a free minds and markets (kudos to Bezos for borrowing their tagline), the oldest and most read site/magazine is Reason.com, surprised it wasn’t mentioned but I guess it’s always hard to decide if libertarian is considered conservative or not.
You very clearly included podcasters, so where does Lex Fridman fit?
Despite being moderately insightful, I don't think you understand Musk that well. He is in fact smarter than he may appear. Look at Musk's use of Twitter, for example.
Less successful people, like me, use the Internet and social media as a way to expend their energy and attention. Moderately successful people, like you, use social media to both expend and to draw attention, and to interact with others in a somewhat give-and-take fashion.
While Musk does spend attention on social media, above all he draws it. He is extremely successful at this. Gaining control over Twitter and promoting his posts allowed him to gain unprecedented attention from millions of people. This helped him to extremely quickly gain power as a close advisor to the President of the United States. It has also worked out financially; despite at first losing money on Twitter, his net worth has massively increased. No doubt his celebrity status is a major contributor to this success.
In general, I think Musk's innovative use of information technology is one of the most interesting things about him. For example, there's his attempt to use email to circumvent the normal reporting hierarchy of the United States federal government. I understand that this is a strategy he already uses at his own companies. In essence, this is a new organizational form that is enabled by direct digital communication. 20 years ago, it was not possible to efficiently communicate directly with so many people. Using this new possibility allows him to expand his own personal reach and influence. He can be personally involved in every aspect of the company.
While this organizational form may have business benefits, the most important benefit is social. Social life is largely driven by the human desire to please others and to avoid displeasing them. The strength of this desire depends on the frequency and directness with which two people have contact. Elon Musk has unprecedentedly frequent and direct contact with his employees, giving him an unprecedented social significance at every level of his companies. He has a social significance that he wouldn't have if he were simply a CEO in a distant boardroom.
Musk is now applying this same strategy in an attempt to gain unprecedented social significance at all levels of American and world society as a whole. Up until now, he has been incredibly successful. I expect this success to continue.