How to Fix America in One Week

Feb 4th note: This is a repost of an article I submitted to X article contest on Jan 22nd. Note that since I am reposting it as is, it does not incorporate any information from the recent DOJ file releases.

Hello. You may have seen and acted upon an article on “How to fix your life in one day,” or at least bookmarked it. Once you are done fixing your life, it’s good to set your mind to bigger things. Let’s fix America. It will take longer than a day, but perhaps we can be done in a week if we are efficient enough.

You might expect a “call to action,” a “policy,” or at least some sort of way to select personnel. I do not propose any such things. America’s problems start with a fundamental misunderstanding of itself and a deep incongruence between the story it tells itself and what it actually is. Sound familiar? It should. The majority of this article (and the week) is going to be spent acquiring the proper understanding. After the understanding has been acquired, many people (this may be YOU) can begin to come up with and implement the actual solutions needed to improve the country.

My main call to action is thus to create an understanding. Once the understanding is created, the model of the world is correct and the incongruence is resolved, one can proceed further along any number of routes.

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.

Perhaps you have read so far and have discovered nothing new. But wait, there is more. To understand America you MUST understand the perspective and incentives of the most important people in America: the people to whom the state gives all of the taxpayers’ money.

You see, when the state is $40 trillion in debt, this money didn’t just magically disappear into a black hole. Rather, it was spent on projects the government was somehow convinced were useful or necessary at the time. 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.” Not every person paid by the state is an oligarch. There are some people who simply collect an upper-middle-class paycheck inside an agency that doesn’t do anything.

“Market oligarchs” are usually well-known founders of new firms who stay in the spotlight. “State oligarchs” are less well known. However, they exist and their incentives and actions are the key to shaping the past, present, and future of America.

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.

Not all state oligarchs get money directly from the state. Some have an extra step of indirection by either having the state require a consumer to buy a product (such as the case with a lot of healthcare) or they primarily rely on consumers who get money from the state (such as the case with stores targeting welfare recipients). Both transactions should be modeled as being part of the “state” economy, which is why the 40% of GDP is an underestimate for it.

If you look at the actual money flows from the working-class taxpayer to the government and then to a combination of defense contractors, the finance industry, healthcare providers, and simply speaking, waste, then you can begin to label the relationship between the state oligarchs and the rest of society in proper terms.

The state oligarchs OWN the state.

Not all financial flows from the state to others imply some sort of ownership. If you sell cars and you sell the same cars for the same price to the consumer and the government, this is simply providing a service. However, if you promise to deliver a high-speed rail, take the money, and deliver 1% of the promised rail, this is not “providing a service.” You got that money because you OWN the state, and you are simply getting the state that you own to pay you.

Many well-meaning people might not like rephrasing the flow of money from the taxpayer to the state oligarchs as an “ownership” relationship. They might want to call it “fraud.” The confusion is understandable. However, “fraud” is something that the state doesn’t want; it actively investigates and prevents it. If a particular person got a lot of money from the state to set up a “quality learing center,” then paid a local investigatory office a part of that money to not investigate it, and then also promised a local official to help with some election ballot numbers... well, this is no longer “fraud” on a de-facto basis. This is a small-stake ownership of the “state,” which is an entity that includes investigators and officials. On some sort of “de-jure” basis, everything they are doing might still be “fraud,” however, what use is quoting laws to people who own (or are a part of) the state?

The concept of “owning the state” and being “net long” taxation is the key to understanding the MAJORITY of the US economy. The state isn’t some sort of “cherry” on top of the market pie; rather, the process of getting money from the state *is* the majority of the US economy. The people who make a lot of money from the state, such as basically everyone in the “special banks,” then spend that money in the market to buy nice houses and go on fancy vacations.

You might object that “ownership” is an improper term, that perhaps they don’t own things “directly.” However, a lot of looking under the hood of “payments” reveals a number of credit cards that were on paper controlled by a bureaucrat, but they were told by someone to approve all expenses without question or even comment. Given how difficult it is for the elected president to even know about all of these credit cards or accounts, let alone stop them, and how easy it is to get paid once the card is established, we can only conclude that “ownership” is an appropriate term.

The process of taking money from the middle-class taxpayer and moving it to the upper-class finance/healthcare/defense owners is *regressive*. In other words, it moves money from the poor to the rich. It is even more regressive once you look at actual consumption and fertility rate patterns of the two groups. From the perspective of inequality, owning the state is not fundamentally different than owning capital. However, once you compare the “market oligarchs” to “state oligarchs,” the differences between owning capital and owning the state become apparent. Given sufficiently high taxation, the owners of the state may actually have a bigger net gain via taxation from a valuable company than the company founders.

Once you understand the concepts of “owning the state,” a large number of ideas about inequality, society, and the future are immediately exposed as complete nonsense.

One idea that comes up again and again is the idea of “wealth or income redistribution” as a “solution” to inequality. This may seem interesting to naive people who falsely believe that the US is majority a market economy and falsely believe that capital accumulation is a major driver of inequality. Instead, the ownership of the state is the primary driver of inequality. Any increase of taxation of the market oligarchs either destroys their wealth entirely, depriving consumers of a source of value, OR it moves the money to the state, which is ultimately regressive. The market oligarchs generally pass their taxes onto the consumer, and those taxes generally end up in the pockets of state oligarchs.

In fact, the United States has formed a “negative feedback loop” of financial and cultural decline. 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.

Propaganda Funding

The above example of misunderstanding “inequality” is one of the many secondary issues that crop up in America’s false image of itself, in misunderstanding “state” vs. “market” oligarchs, not understanding the core concept of ownership of the state, and not understanding the root causes of nearly every social phenomenon.

The important fact about American society is not just that the finance people get taxpayer money to spend on nice houses and vacations. Rather, a lot of the “state oligarch” money is spent on keeping the “ownership” relationship intact. There are many pathways to this; it may mean directly speaking with important bureaucrats and convincing them to just wire some checks, or it may involve controlling media or convincing voters in some other way. In any case, this involves propaganda.

Propaganda comes in many forms, but two key ones are important to look out for when it comes to maintaining control over the state; I call them the “clueless” and the “worship” propaganda.

The first type of propaganda is what I would call “clueless” propaganda—one that deals with the state, the state oligarchs, and their funding by refusing to ever mention their existence. An example of clueless propaganda is: “AI will lead to a lot of inequality via capital accumulation; we must tax wealth in the future.” The clueless propaganda simply assumes that we live in a “market economy,” that this market economy and capital accumulation is somehow the main driver of economic outcomes, and that the state is some sort of “benevolent by default” force.

These claims are obviously false for anyone who has dared to look up ANY statistic about what the US is doing: how much of the economy is retiree spending, healthcare, defense, education, etc. The people who believe clueless propaganda are walking around San Francisco wondering questions such as, “Well, another famous math problem was solved by AI; why hasn’t it had a massive economic impact?” They might look up from their daydreams to notice that homeless people still exist and are frequently “in-your-face” there. Why doesn’t the famous-math-problem-to-solving-homelessness pipeline already function? Where is it broken?

I will explain again for those people specifically. The US is not a market economy. Even if I grant that AI *can* be successful in delivering value once a bunch of reliability problems are solved, the “value” that it delivers is ONLY in the market economy. If you falsely believe that “market economy” value somehow translates to “overall value to the average taxpayer,” then OF COURSE you are going to be confused about the relationship between AI and economic outcomes. Once you understand that the “state economy” is larger than the “market economy,” the lack of “improvement” due to AI (or any technology whatsoever) becomes apparent.

Any idea that somehow the “market” can outgrow the “state” via “acceleration” or “compounding” or “singularity” is another example of “clueless” propaganda. The “market economy” can be shrunk at the will of the state. In corporate terms, the state is a “parent company” and the entire market economy is a “child company.” The child company struggles to outgrow the parent regardless of its compounding BECAUSE the said compounding may increase the parent company MORE than the child company IF the parent company continuously grabs an ever-increasing portion of the child company as it grows.

The second type of propaganda is the propaganda of “state worship” or “we need this” propaganda. This type is more about directly asserting the need for a particular movement of money. Why should we fund high-speed rail in California? Because California NEEDS high-speed rail, just like Minnesota needs at-home daycares. Let’s take a deep breath and LET GO. Let go of the idea that we NEED anything. Clearly, California can survive perfectly well WITHOUT high-speed rail. How do I know this? Well, because it doesn’t have any high-speed rail right now and the state is still there. Funding “high-speed rail” doesn’t create any high-speed rail. Wanting to create more high-speed rail doesn’t lead to its creation. So, the important thing is to stop wanting. Desire (for the high speed rail) is the root of suffering (paying money for the high speed rail to not be there). We can go through the process of “letting go” of nearly all of our desires. The real market economy and the non-market cultural mechanisms are shockingly resilient; they actually need very little to produce okay outcomes.

The Closed Loop

You may be wondering if the conclusion is for the state to “stop all spending.” I want to be slightly more realistic. The purpose of the previous section is primarily to point out two of the main types of propaganda that seem to pervade the cultural sphere and prevent the important discussion from taking place.

It is important to understand how the money flows from the taxpayers into the coffers of the state oligarchs, but the money doesn’t just get spent by them on nice boats and houses. It also gets spent on propaganda, which ensures the continuity of control over the state. The propaganda for “let’s spend a ton of money for non-existent daycares” has much better funding than the counter-statements of “can we just NOT?”

Both the propaganda and the methods used to justify the transfer of money from the taxpayers to the state oligarchs can frequently be MORE harmful than the actual transfer itself. If the US simply wrote a giant check to the defense contractors from time to time, this is less harmful to the world than going to war somewhere to justify this spending. It is still unsustainable in the long term, but at least you don’t anger God by killing a bunch of people in some far-away country. If the US simply wrote a check to certain pharma companies, this would be better than mandating a bad health product. Writing a check to the hotel industry is safer from the crime perspective than housing immigrants in those hotels.

This is the problem with the *actions* being taken to “justify” the movement of money from the taxpayer to the state owners. However, the “discourse” generated to justify this movement is also quite harmful because it prevents proper thinking about what to do about America’s problems, because there is a complete disconnect between what America is: a state economy and the image of a “market economy with redistribution” that it pretends to be.

The pervasiveness of propaganda takes up a lot of thinking and discussion space. It takes a ton of people’s energy mulling ideas in their heads and ruminating on predictions that are based on faulty assumptions about the nature of the “economy.” People spend inordinate amounts of time “worrying” and “thinking” about AI either not moving fast enough to “outgrow” waste or moving “too fast” and creating “inequality.” Both are fundamentally irrelevant. The relevant question is: who owns the state and what do they do with it?

Once you recognize the closed-loop nature of the state economy, the money flow, and the idea flows: State economy money funds the production and perpetuation of ideas that either ignore its existence or attempt to justify it by ignoring the discrepancy between its promises and its deliverables.

Other forms of propaganda that are completely worthless to “worry” about:

* Are zoomers working hard enough or are they too entitled? Based on the incidence of back pain and the low fertility rate, the taxpaying class has been working TOO hard compared to what a human population should be expected to do if it wishes to continue, since about the early 1970s.

* If only the elites were more coordinated, we would fix things. This is also known in some circles as “Moloch,” the god of anti-coordination. It is another roundabout way to blame “capitalism.” The lack of “coordination” among elites is not the defining problem. The elites do not lack social cohesion within themselves; rather, there is a lack of social cohesion between the elites and the taxpayers. The elites could be more coordinated and things could get worse for the taxpayer. Blaming “incentives” or “Moloch” doesn’t actually get to the issue that one can actually use proper incentives to coordinate across classes, or that non-capitalist structures comprise the majority of society.

The Relevant Question

The relevant question, the defining question of any historical period, but certainly the defining question of the 21st century, is:

Who owns the state and what do they want?

While the article so far may have led some to believe that the solution is to completely remove the owners of the state from their ownership, this is NOT the suggested course of action. Remember, the first step is fully understanding the problem, not jumping to solutions right away.

In order to properly approach the question of “who owns the state right now and who should own the state in the future,” we must keep understanding a few more things.

One, there is no real alternative to *someone* owning the state. The illusion of the taxpayer actually owning the state is an illusion. The president doesn’t control the spending; he may need a completely new agency to keep *track* of all the spending. To actually turn things off, you need someone with much more real, actual power than the president. Otherwise, you will simply get slapped with the propaganda, street fights, and lawfare by the people whose funding is threatened. The owners of the state own the tools that ensure control of the state.

It took a long time for them to do so. Did your father play golf with the judges for decades to give your law firm a certain reputation for winning cases? Did your grandfather conduct unethical bio-experiments on unsuspecting people so that you can continue the tradition in your pharma company? Did your great-grandfather tirelessly edit op-eds in the newspaper justifying yet-another-war-crime, so that the newspaper could survive to become the paper-of-record? Were any of your ancestors anywhere close to Jekyll Island in 1913? Statistically speaking, I don’t think that’s true for either of us, dear reader, which makes us the underclass, though unlikely to be a “permanent one.” The owners of the state (or more likely their ancestors) worked a lot to get the tools of state ownership. The old-money state owners despise the new-money tech oligarchs for merely getting some “means of production” in less than one generation.

Two, there can be far worse owners of the state than the status quo. There can also be far better ones. The issue is that many propagandists got a bit too high on their own supply and started believing that “getting rid of white people” is somehow an actual goal of the state, rather than a tool of suppressing opposition to collect taxpayer money for the sake of state oligarchs. Or some midwits went even farther, thinking “getting rid of all people” should be an actual goal of the state. You may think this is somehow an exaggeration, but there are a number of “transhumanists” who believe this, and each one is as annoying and hard to look at as the next. So, the existence of worse alternatives also keeps the existing structure in power. Obviously, there are better ones. It would be better if the state was owned by people who believed in both extending regular human lifespan and conquering the stars.

The issue of losing control of your own people is an important realization. The owners of the state may frequently have an easier time fighting outside challengers than they have keeping their own employees, politicians, and propagandists in check. We can see some examples of this in the debates about the recent proposed wealth tax in California. The wealthy Dem donors are horrified that the wealth tax is actually going to reduce state revenue, while the congressperson in favor of this is dunking on them for not building imaginary wonderlands for free. The whole scene is straight out of *The Dark Knight Rises*, where the short oligarch tells his hired communist (Bane), “I have given you a small fortune.”

Remember, the state oligarchs are “net long” actually collected taxation. They are not automatically “net long” the tax “rate”. The tax rate getting too high would cause actually collected taxation to decline. However, the people they hire to spread the hate or implement the tax policy against their natural enemies do not understand anything I just said, so they tend to favor severely over-taxation proposals.

This discrepancy between the state oligarchs and their own “representatives” is a good opportunity to renegotiate the entire arrangement. But doing so would mean skipping both the “clueless” propaganda that asserts that we are (or should be) a market economy and the “worship” propaganda that somehow claims the state works for the average person.

An Example Method - The Deal

Once again, the goal here is not to suggest an “exact” course of action, rather to “shake off” the false beliefs that prevent even the discussion of what America is or how to proceed further. Once the false beliefs have been discarded, the real discussion can take place and the hivemind can begin to come up with solutions. That said, I can suggest some starting points about what actions can or cannot be taken.

There is a type of person who simply wants to wrestle control of the state from its owners and either do something cool with it or give it back to “the people.” While I am sympathetic to this worldview, assuming the person is actually interested in the good of the average person, most methods to do so lack a realistic understanding of the power structure.

One might look at the spending structure and scream that “we must fix the fraud.” While “fraud,” as defined by the act of actually doing something illegal, is in fact a part of government spending, it is by no means the most damaging part. First of all, the real state owners are generally more sophisticated than to crudely break the law. Demanding the absence of “fraud” or even “overcharging” may actually backfire. If you start demanding more stuff from defense contractors, they might spend their money advocating for more useless wars. If you start demanding more explanation from health providers, they might make up more harmful procedures to do. If you start trying to set quotas for law enforcement, they might entrap more innocent people to fill quotas. Demanding “return” on your money can frequently backfire in worse ways than mere “fraud.”

Once again, the desire to fix “fraud” still stems from the wrong model of the world where the state oligarchs are “providing services” to the state in exchange for money. If you keep believing the wrong thing, it is very easy to make the problem worse. They might provide services, but this is an incidental function. They simply “own the state,” and they get dividends from their ownership.

Instead of trying to “fix fraud,” you must engage with the concept of “ownership” directly. Here is one of the many possible ways to do this.

Imagine you notice a company which has great potential but is struggling due both to its management and because the shareholders keep paying OVERLY HIGH dividends that undermine the maintenance of the core business. What do you do if you want to “save” the company? Do you roll up to the headquarters and declare yourself the new management (or the new owner)? Even if you are good at managing things, the existing ownership structures would not want you in charge if they don’t expect a good ROI for *them*.

Just to make things obvious, the company is America, the core business is creating Americans, and the dividends are the tax payments which block the taxpayer from having a high fertility rate.

Well, in this situation, you can attempt to negotiate with the owners about “buying” the company from them. You pay off the shareholders to get rid of their stake. Or you create a mutual agreement across the shareholders to reduce dividends and to stop them from going up again. In other words, you need to make a DEAL. One that gives the current stakeholders either a lump sum of cash or a promise of a reasonable cash flow that allows the company to keep growing, in return for actual control of the company without the need for further payments.

It may seem strange in the context of America to keep paying existing stakeholders some money to literally “do nothing”; however, it is more honest to do that than to pay them MORE money to “not build high-speed rail.”

Again, this “Deal” is not the only option. It is just an example of an option you consider because you understand the relationship of the American economy. Once you understand the flow of money from the taxpayers to the state, to the state oligarchs, to the propagandists who advocate for more spending, you can begin to interrupt the negative feedback loop at specific points. Whatever points you interrupt the loop at will create a different class of solutions that might involve paying off different stakeholders to work for the taxpayer instead of against them.

With that in mind, let’s actually go through a “week” that it would take to “fix” America, meaning setting it up on a proper path to self-improvement, interrupting the negative feedback loops, and creating positive ones.

**Day 1 (This is today, the day YOU finish this article)**

* Everyone shares this article on X to get on the same page.

**Day 2**

* We discuss the problem at length, approaching every possible angle and talking about the high-level concepts.

**Day 3**

* The discussion continues; however, this time we collectively bring a ton of DATA to the table. Who are the state oligarchs? How much money is flowing and to whom? What are they doing with that money? What politics do they have, and who are they funding?

**Day 4**

* We begin the long and involved process of actual disentanglement from the previous bad ideas about what America is. This specific process is going to be an ongoing work in progress for decades at least. Generally, this involves examining every previous idea that did not take into account the proper concept of “ownership of the state” in light of the new understanding of “ownership of the state.” “What will happen with AI?” is an important question, but it has to be asked properly: “How will AI alter the dynamics of the ownership of the state?”

**Day 5**

* While the disentanglement keeps going, we begin brainstorming solutions (hopefully being nice to each other) that take into account which monetary flows work. One discussion might turn to which state oligarchs HAVE to be bought off and made DEALS with, and which ones can be safely ignored. Obviously, making deals involves creating enforcement mechanisms so that the “deals” don’t get immediately altered.

**Day 6**

* We create proper systems for tracking the flows of taxpayers’ money and tracking the sources of propaganda and its funding. This may involve a bunch of vibe-coded websites that make the state, the state oligarchs, and the propaganda outlets they fund be as legible to the taxpayer as the taxpayer is legible to the IRS. Once again, the purpose here is simply to get back to the baseline of human existence—the servants ought to know who their masters are. Right now, we are not at this baseline; the servants (taxpayers) are confused about the situation, and this confusion is creating a lot of unnecessary stress about the future.

**Day 7**

* We rest and reflect on the process itself, as we have set America on the right path of understanding itself and fixing itself.

Voila.

To summarize the key points:

America’s problems start from the question of identity. It believes itself to be a market economy with a little bit of “redistribution state” on top, with the state providing some smoothing of inequality. This identity is completely at odds with what it actually does, which is moving money from the actual lower classes (the taxpayers) to the upper classes (state oligarchs). This movement, the justifications for it, and the propaganda required to maintain this movement comprise the majority of the “economy.” The amount of money spent maintaining the “false identity” is higher than the amount of effort spent maintaining the actual “body” of the nation. If we are to fix anything about America, we must create crystal clarity about what the state is, who the owners are, and how to negotiate better deals with them. Once the understanding has been achieved, we can move away from the frequently harmful need to “justify” spending money and re-negotiate a more honest model. Whatever this model is, and regardless of how the existing stakeholders are negotiated with, the only big requirement is to stop the flow of both the “clueless” and “worship” propaganda.