Episode 2921 CWSA 08/08/25 — Scott Adams Philosophy

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NewsReaction Politics as Persuasion

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Context —

hat's over and we're all on the same page that that terrible criminal operation happened and that something must be done to get justice for the country. Oh, wait. Nothing like that's happening. Mollie Hemingway is pointing out that the Atlantic, which is one of the Democrat media that pretends it's something else, and Anne Applebaum and others are, as Mollie Hemingway says, clinging bitterly to t…

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sn't really even a thing under the Biden administration. Do you remember any story about oh, this department figured out a way to cut their expenses 10%? Nobody needed to. It wasn't even a thing. But given that you know that Trump would give you attention and your career could benefit if you did some cost cutting, now it's almost a competitive sport. Everybody's looking for a way to get in on this. How do we make the boss happy? So that's all good.

I would love to see if there is a model for federalizing a city. You may be temporarily, maybe not. That would work because in my view the thing that breaks every city is that you have people who get elected who are willing to steal money with one of the many ways that you can do that when you're in charge. Usually it means steering business in one direction versus another. And it's easy to hide that you're getting paid directly or indirectly. There's always a lot of money involved. Everybody's got a friend who works in that domain. It's like, "Oh, you want the garbage contract? Well, if you made a donation to my wife's charity you might get that contract." So one way to fix the cities is to not allow any of the elected officials to dec

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ide where money goes. Like it's almost like you need some independent entity to make money decisions, at least in terms of awarding contracts. But I would love to see if you could do a government in a box where a city just says, "All right, we give up. We can't fix it because we don't have the right people here. Everything's broken." And so some government in a box, ideally American entity, comes…

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Wisdom from this episode

"The thing that breaks every city is that you have people who get elected who are willing to steal money with one of the many ways that you can do that when you're in charge. Usually it means steering business in one direction versus another. And it's easy to hide that you're getting paid directly or indirectly."

Cities fail because elected officials routinely enrich themselves by steering contracts to allies, which is simple to conceal through indirect payoffs like donations.

"Given that you know that Trump would give you attention and your career could benefit if you did some cost cutting, now it's almost a competitive sport. Everybody's looking for a way to get in on this. How do we make the boss happy?"

When leaders visibly reward efficiency with attention and career boosts, cutting costs becomes a competitive organizational game as people focus on pleasing the boss.