You can’t do this Lei! How will you pay for all of it?!

Lei: MMT duh. Money is made up by sovereign authority and the state is never going bankrupt. Why are we limiting state capacity for crying bankers? A national economy can’t all be the private finance controlled market yo!

Wealth tax for all wealth above $1 million. 100% tax at $100 million, substituting capital gains. But the taxation mechanism won’t be in the form of money payments. Instead the state collects wealth shares. Whenever the assets are liquidated for cash the state gets a claim.

30% Shareholder Equity Ownership Cap for Publicly Traded Corporations
Legally Mandated Codetermination +
50% Employee Ownership of Midsized and Larger Firms (dilutable to 35/35 employee/management split if publicly traded)
Court/Regulatory Body to Dissolve+Restructure Debts Above Certain Value

Universal At Birth Child Investment Grant
Universal Basic Savings Account (default deposit account for all welfare transfer and stimulus payments)
Sovereign Wealth Fund
Hard Price Controls On Higher Ed
National Department of Science & Industrial Innovation (Put NASA, NSF, DARPA, and NHS under this)

You are either busy formulating new tools to understand the Chinese condition in the 21st century or you’re busy turning into a craggy senior crank railing against new unyielding realities as you’re rapidly left behind in the endnotes of historical recollection.

So yeah, this is what a typical conversation inside the upper echelons of SV culture looks like. That’s the worldview they maintain in private while operating their public politics. The stuff you see on Twitter isn’t fringe or caricatured. It’s in fact mainstream in their elite techbro bubble.

“What China essentially has is a hierarchical Confucian system…in a world of modern technology…they’re in very deep trouble”

“6000 Christians have been slaughtered around the world in the name of Islam”

“Radical left putting masks on…what’s the difference between you and the KKK”

“Xi has no clue what’s going on…walled off…they’re all too scared to tell him anything”

“Their demography is collapsing…they don’t have enough fertilizer to grow enough food with the land they have”

“I’ve traveled all around China…let me tell you the Chinese people are patient until they’re not”

More snippets if people want to get a sense for how the flow of this conversation went:

“Meeting the pope next week as part of a group to advise on AI…we need guardrails”

“Europe is dead man walking”

“Western civilization vs authoritarianism”

“China is in the process of collapsing”

@rajakorman.bsky.social took over this account I see

This is a big comprehension gap between how people in China and America understand economic sentiments they hear about from the other side. Their understanding of what “bad” is are worlds apart because in America precarity has become the default baseline while in China default baseline is growth.