What if Oligarchs Directly Ran the Government?

That's the plan.

You may say that oligarchs already directly run the government, but that’s not quite the case yet. They may own the government, but they have the politicians that they own run it.

But having that middleman in the process is very inefficient. What if we just got the government out of the way and let the oligarchs run things directly?

Wouldn’t that be more efficient and better for everyone?

If you have been watching the first two months of the Trump administration and answered an emphatic NO!, don’t worry - that is just the beta test.

Welcome to the Techno-Oligarchy.

While Elon Musk is trying to be the least popular kid in school by using DOGE to shut down departments that are investigating his companies - and cutting off essential services to many Americans, his tech bros are staying under the radar.

But if you look a little closer, it isn’t hard to find the thinking behind the plan. You can read about it in Project 2025, or in the writings of a man who has become the “intellectual” of the tech bro takeover of America, Curtis Yarvin.

You can find plenty on Yarvin online, and many of you already know of him. If you don’t you should, because he is a writer who has the ears of the Tech elite, mostly because he tells them that they are great and should be running things.

You can find a good summary of Yarvin’s influence in this great profile from Gil Duran, Where J.D. Vance Gets His Weird, Terrifying Techno-Authoritarian Ideas | The New Republic

Yarvin is the main intellectual power behind what some call the “Dark Enlightenment,” on the right which promotes dictatorships as superior to democracies. Yarvin has helped popularize the idea among tech elites that the United States should be broken up into smaller fiefdoms, each controlled by a tech corporation and run like a company by a CEO, not elected representatives. My guess is that not many Republicans in the US Congress know of Yarvin because he is telling the billionaires that own them to just get rid of them. I’m sure they will heroically spring into action once they figure out what is going on.

Yarvin famously encouraged the new Trump administration to fire all mid-level bureaucrats in the government in what he called RAGE: Retire All Government Employees. You might have heard Musk and other’s use this acronym.

This comes from the Silicon Valley ethic of “move fast and break things” in order to get things done. Not a bad strategy when you are looking to launch a new technology. A pretty terrible one when the things you are breaking are people who need those services to do things like eat, breathe, have shelter and other non-dying related activities.

These sovereign mini-countries would be the law of the land. Imagine Amazon owning and running Washington State, in which Amazon is the law, with no pesky federal bureaucracy to stand in its way. You would be free to move from Amazon/Washington, but you would only go to other sovereign corporate states where you wouldn’t have any rights either.

You are a serf again, and the kings and noblemen have been replaced by CEOs and their Vice Presidents. Does neo-feudalism sound fun yet?

Yarvin’s writings give oligarchs and tech bros the narrative they want to hear because it reveres them and does not question them.

An example of is Tech billionaire Marc Andreessen who happily says he is a friend of Yarvin and spouts some of his ideas on interviews like this. Andreessen says that we are still living under FDR’s personal monarchy 80 years later, without FDR. He says that the federal government before didn’t really do much but because of the New Deal and WWII, the government got much bigger. Andreessen also says that FDR ran the federal government by himself at the time. When FDR died, Andreessen claims that all the programs he created stayed around, and the problem is that you don’t have the founder/CEO FDR to run them and now you have the mess without the brilliant founder. So Social Security, which keeps many elderly people out of abject poverty, is bad because the one man who is solely responsible for it, who didn’t have any help at all in creating it is gone. Right.

I think everyone who has served in government in any capacity since FDR died might have a bone to pick with Andreessen.

This argument is generally “the great man theory” and oh by the way, we billionaires are the great men.

These people are never told no, and the nice thing about being a billionaire is that you never have a bad idea once you become one. People agree with you, or you can pay someone else to clean up the mess.

We the people - are the mess.

An example of what may be in store.

Remember when Donald Trump said he wanted Greenland. Well, that could just be because Praxis co-founder Dryden Brown posted on X “I went to Greenland to try to buy it,” after Donald Trump won reelection in November.

What is Praxis, you ask? It is a city-state in waiting with funding over half a billion dollars so that some billionaires can build their own country. This is not a joke. Trump nominated an executive with links to Praxis (Ken Howery) as ambassador to Denmark, which owns Greenland.

Never mind the Greenland citizens have overwhelmingly stated that: 'We Don't Want to be Americans,'. That won’t stop tech billionaires.

Greenland’s current GDP is about US$3.236 billion as if 2021. So, maybe Praxis will just say, we’ll pay you half a billion, or you can be invaded by America, like in the boardgame Risk, your choice.

And don’t forget you will have a CEO/King that makes all the laws and is answerable to no one. Do we have a deal?

If corporations are people, and kings can rule countries, then logically corporations can become kings, and run their own little fiefdoms run by an all-powerful CEO who need not adhere to any pesky laws or regulations.

It might not be all bad though. I’m going to see if I can move to the Ben & Jerry’s kingdom.