:up:

If we can squeeze a trillion dollars out our worker pockets, think how much can be squeezed out of the pockets of the 1%? — BC

The US ultra rich pay obscenely low amounts of income tax, something that will never be challenged by MAGA, which is after all has a record number of billionaires in Cabinet.

After looking up the definitions, I've changed the thread title.

Oligarchy - government by a select group.

Plutocracy - government by the very wealthy.

As the Trump cabinet comprises 13 billionaires, and as the World's Richest Man is acting as a kind of freelance change agent on Trump's behalf, 'plutocracy' is nearer the mark that 'oligarchy'.

The US paid off the huge WWII national debt through a combination of economic growth (a boom), higher rates of taxation (especially on top earners), and fiscal discipline. — BC

The U.K. government only just finished paying its debts to slave owners in 2015

But we paid our war debts to the US earlier.

In a competition for arsehole global saviour of the millennium, I think Britain has the edge, just because we have been at it longer and in more places than anyone else.

But panic not. Netanyahu is giving Gaza to Trump, and he will build the mother of all holiday resorts on it and the boom times will be back. You lucky lucky people.

But if you save all that $1.3 trillion, what are you going to do with all the time you won't spend making distributing and consuming all that junk? There'd be a fentanyl famine for sure; that's just the way the economy swings.

The DOGE Troupe:

Musk’s team of youngsters, as first reported by WIRED on Sunday, is Akash Bobba, 21, a student at the University of California, Berkeley; Edward Coristine, 19, a student at Northeastern University in Boston; and Ethan Shaotran, 22, who said in September he was a senior at Harvard.

The ones who actually have degrees, or at least have left college, are: Luke Farritor, 23, who attended the University of Nebraska without graduating; Gautier Cole Killian, a 24-year-old who attended McGill University; and Gavin Kliger, a 25-year-old who attended Berkeley;

The group’s relative lack of experience—especially no previous positions in government work—has Democrats crying foul they were granted access to sensitive records while remaining largely in the shadows, away from public scrutiny.
All six desperately tried to cover their digital tracks recently, almost all of them deleting LinkedIn profiles, X accounts and even Facebook. — TheDailyBeast

These are the experts who Trusk is using to manhandle ten thousand employees out of their jobs.

As the Trump cabinet comprises 13 billionaires, and as the World's Richest Man is acting as a kind of freelance change agent on Trump's behalf, 'plutocracy' is nearer the mark that 'oligarchy'. — Wayfarer

It was always an article of faith amongst my circle that America is a plutocracy. It's been owned and run by corporations for some time. Isn't the difference now just one of aesthetics and a different mob of sharks? It's now more celebrated and the names are better known. I remember when Obama bailed out the banks after the last cuntact from the financial elite. Cornel West said, what do you expect from a President whose key advisors were mostly from Citybank. West called Obama “a black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs and a black puppet of corporate plutocrats."

When you're cost cutting, that's also a good time to eliminate entities that may have harassed you in the past, and those who might one day. They have a list of good guys to put in slots. Just sayin.

It’s not business as usual.

A report on the immediate and drastic impacts of the USAID closure in Africa.

Foreign Strongmen Cheer as Musk Dismantles U.S. Aid Agency

Well, this is written for the New Yorker's audience, but I am pretty sure conservatives would take this in the opposite direction. Here you have a bunch of unelected officials shoveling out US taxpayer money to foreigners. They know the democratically elected head of state doesn't want them to keep doing this, and thus that they have no real mandate to do it. They no doubt know that their work is not very popular with the American public. But they scramble to get as much cash out the door as possible. The recalcitrance!

On the other hand, I think it's fair to say that the officials are the only ones in this situation who actually realize the consequences that will follow from halting the funding. Indeed, they might very well know that at least some funding cuts/delays will run directly counter to Trump's goals on foreign policy and migration. Trump (and his lieutenant Musk) and the voters have the weight of democratic opinion and legitimacy, but are largely acting from ignorance.



Other countries tend to be squeamish about security aid, so a lot of US aid is essentially covering that side of it so that the Europeans can "keep their hands clean." No doubt, one could complain about the destination of such aid, or the way it is sometimes shaped to benefit defense contractors, but it certainly is important. There are plenty of cases to demonstrate that, without proper security/military infrastructure, billions of aid just ends up being wasted, either destroyed or looted. Of course, you can also waste billion in security aid. Case in point: the ANA routing on contact with the enemy, or the SAA doing the same after years of substantial Russian and Iranian support.




Thanks, we here take great pride in our ability to have constructed such a Kafkaesque system.

I mean, the other options were to allow for a catastrophic domino effect of bank failures along the lines of the Great Depression or to nationalize the banks. But at least part of the 2008 financial crisis was due to the perverse incentives faced by massive government run banks, and America's student loan crisis shows how these sorts of problems are not easily dealt with. At any rate, he would need Congress to nationalize the banks, and probably a majority of the Court, and he could count on neither for a solution that radical. TARP and the extraordinary actions of the Fed actually began under Bush at any rate.

The plan was to save the banks quick to forestall collapse, then, when there was time to think carefully, introduce a raft of new legislation to prevent such problems in the future. Unfortunately, Ted Kennedy died and the GOP took the House in the mid-terms and so the final regulatory bill that came out was drastically reduced in scope from what might have been ideal. It was still a very major reform though.

Not bailing out the banks would be the more consequential equivalent of dealing with waste at USAID by just shutting down the entire agency in a day. As soon as he moved to suspend TARP and ordered the Fed to stop buying securities, the markets would have gone back into freefall and unemployment would start soaring again. It would have been incredibly dumb; I don't even think Trump would do it.

But at least part of the 2008 financial crisis was due to the perverse incentives faced by massive government run banks, and America's student loan crisis shows how these sorts of problems are not easily dealt with. — Count Timothy von Icarus

What? I assume you're referring to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, while they had charters, they were privately owned and only became "government run" after the crisis. Let alone that all those "professional" private banks and investment funds invested in alt-A and subprime mortgage backed securities securitised by Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae without understanding the risks related to them, e.g. they were so professional they had no clue what they bought. The market collectively underestimated the risks because money was cheap and everybody was running around looking for yield. And in that respect nothing has improved since then.

To claim the 2008 financial crisis was due to perverse incentives at massive government run banks is smply not true.

Thanks, we here take great pride in our ability to have constructed such a Kafkaesque system. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I defy you to come up with anything remotely as Kafkaesque as spending 180 years compensating slave owners for depriving them of their slaves. Mind you, now that the people of Gaza have been reduced to a logistical problem, it is only two steps to the final solution; step one, concentration camp; step two, extermination camp. But even there, we Brits got there first in South Africa, though it took German discipline to industrialise the process efficiently.

There is zero chance that DOGE / Musk will go after United Health Care, et al. The sort of government spending that will be sacrificed are USAID, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, National Public Radio, National Endowment for the Humanities. The Library of Congress? How many congressmen ever check out books there, anyway? Sell it to Amazon! — BC

Oh, those will surely go. But that won't do it. Sooner or later will come a hickup in the form of a crisis. US administrations just push it forward and hope a crisis doesn't happen on their watch.

The size of the national debt does concern me. I understand that deficit spending keeps the economy afloat, particularly, consumption.

people do consume a lot; I do my part. It's good for the economy. BUT if we wanted to tighten our belts and spend less on consumption and spend more on national debt reduction, where could we save a significant amount of money??? — BC

This will only happen through a crisis. And that crisis will happen through the markets, or as the classic political jargon is: the speculators did it and the (add here your enemy that you portray to be behind everything).

Some commentators say that Trump was freaked out by market reactions and agreed on a "30 day pause". The problem is that he cannot give up so easily his wacky ideas of tariffs. The possibility of a recession manufactured by Trump is very likely. And once the economy (US and global) is in recession, then the debt is even more problematic.

* * *

If the USAID is given to the State Department, perhaps the most destabilizing cut offs might be averted. If people think this is just bleeding heart liberals whining, not everything is DEI-nonsense, that Elon is celebrating from the shutdown:

US aid has also played a critical role in managing Al-Hol and Al-Roj camps in northeast Syria, which house over 46,000 displaced individuals—primarily women and children—from former Islamic State of Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) territories. Essential water and sanitation services managed by US-funded humanitarian staff were suddenly suspended, placing camp residents at greater risk of lack of access to safe drinking water, as well as water and vector-borne disease spread. Also alarming was the effect of the sudden pause on funding that contributes to the security and administrative management of major detention facilities holding close to ten thousand ISIS fighters in these areas, which raised concerns among counterterrorism officials about mass prison breaks and a potential ISIS resurgence.

So will Elon unintensionally help ISIS by not paying the prison guards? Syria is in a very precarious state now. These kinds of little issues are off the GOP-narrative, but small hickups like these can happen when you stop for 90 days the financing of absolutely everything. And although Ukraine likely denies it, this is hampering their war effort too, just as the last GOP halt did in the war.

But at least part of the 2008 financial crisis was due to the perverse incentives faced by massive government run banks, and America's student loan crisis shows how these sorts of problems are not easily dealt with. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Nope. It wasn't government run banks that made the 2008 financial crisis. Ninja-loans happened because of the twisted incentives in the market like the other reasons for the excessive mortgage lending (like MBS etc). A very classic speculative bubble.

Well, they certainly were far from the only issue. There were however issues with them, hence the long running conservatorship and major reforms.

Student loans are an even more obvious example. Basically, the system is set up so that people are never turned down for loans, loans which are essentially impossible to discharge mind you. The result is a huge injection of liquidity into the market, which in turn has been at least one of the factors that have led higher education costs to soar ever higher even as more and more of the people actually teaching are poorly paid adjuncts.

It's not unlike how all the mortgage interest deduction does in the long run is drive up home prices while also increasing wealth inequality between renters and owners.

It's not unlike how all the mortgage interest deduction does in the long run is drive up home prices while also increasing wealth inequality between renters and owners. — Count Timothy von Icarus

As we in the Netherlands know all too well...

But at least part of the 2008 financial crisis was due to the perverse incentives faced by massive government run banks, — Count Timothy von Icarus

What massive government run banks? The only government run bank is the Fed.

Fannie and Freddie. Together they hold $7.5 trillion in assets (student loans being another $1.7 trillion, putting these close to all of Wall St. combined, including their foreign holdings). These were created by Congress. They were relatively independent, but that's true of the Fed too. The split with Ginnie Mae only quasiprivatized them, since they were (now quite obviously) still implicitly backed by the state, and they also had Congress passing laws that only applied to them, a sort of hands-on regulation rather than regulation of a wider market. They have now long been directly administered by Federal Housing Finance Agency.

Sallie Mae is instructive here because its spin-off was more than an extension of independence. Sallie won't make the loans DOE does.

Ah. I don't think Fannie and Freddie caused the 2008 crisis, though. It was derivatives, right?

Here you have a bunch of unelected officials shoveling out US taxpayer money to foreigners. They know the democratically elected head of state doesn't want them to keep doing this, and thus that they have no real mandate to do it. They no doubt know that their work is not very popular with the American public. But they scramble to get as much cash out the door as possible. The recalcitrance! — Count Timothy von Icarus

I kind of understand the hostility to foreign aid but as I said, a change in policy ought to be discussed, circulated, and executed carefully with due oversight, not carried out in the dead of night by a hastily-assembled group with no Congressional approval or oversight. That article I copied in above is one of many showing the ripple effects all throughout the developing nations and crises situations as clinics and food distribution centres go dark. Large numbers of people are suffering and dying as a result, although of course, they're not American, so what?

But U.S. government officials privately warn Musk’s blitz appears illegal. 'Privately', because nobody dare criticize Dear Leader.

The chaotic blitz by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has triggered legal objections across Washington, with officials in at least a half-dozen federal agencies and departments raising alarms about whether the billionaire’s assault on government is breaking the law.

Over the past two weeks, Musk’s team has moved to dismantle some U.S. agencies, push out hundreds of thousands of civil servants and gain access to some of the federal government’s most sensitive payment systems. Musk has said these changes are necessary to overhaul what he’s characterized as a sclerotic federal bureaucracy and to stop payments that he says are bankrupting the country and driving inflation.

But many of these moves appear to violate federal law, according to more than two dozen current and former officials, one audio recording, and several internal messages obtained by The Washington Post. Internal legal objections have been raised at the Treasury Department, the Education Department, the U.S. Agency for International Development, the General Services Administration, the Office of Personnel Management, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the White House budget office, among others.

“So many of these things are so wildly illegal that I think they’re playing a quantity game and assuming the system can’t react to all this illegality at once,” said David Super, an administrative law professor at Georgetown Law School. ...

“The big-picture constitutional worry is that there is a kind of shadow executive branch that is existing and operating and exercising power outside of the channels the Constitution and the statutes that Congress authorized,” said Blake Emerson, a professor of constitutional law at the UCLA School of Law.

Another story notes that Congress has basically capitulated to Trump, even though many of his demands and actions are borderline illegal and clearly in violation of what had been previous Republican policy.

I am surprised by the number here who support monarchy.

The new executive is firing many people in the name of changing policy. Those mostly comprise of people who were doing what their job description required of them by established law. The idea that those job descriptions were a personal choice of the employee is stupid. That is the pervasive algorithm of the new administration.

Any private enterprise who behaved in the same way would disappear in a heartbeat.

It was a lot of things, a real witches brew. The derivatives were a major issue, but it was the entire structure of the US housing and lending market that led to the explosion of derivatives in the first place. You can add in the rating agencies too. But part of the reason that the ratings agencies, pension funds, etc. didn't worry as much as they should have is the idea of the implicit state backing for loans made by the parastatals.

Any private enterprise who behaved in the same way would disappear in a heartbeat.

Well, Musk hasn't totally destroyed Twitter yet. He has been blocked from these sorts of antics at his bigger money makers. Just as well, more time to fake video game accomplishments and binge ketamine in between eliminating federal departments and getting into Twitter fights. All in a good days work on the road to being the first trillionaire.

Turning Gaza into a "riviera", meaning a plutocratic playground for pernicious parasites, is an insult to the residents there, of course, and it's a bad idea from every angle EXCEPT the angle of the totally crass brain-rotted mind of Donald Trump.

"Sleepy Joe", Trump sneered. What about senility Don?

Panama, Canada, Greenland, Gaza... Why not seize the French Riviera -- that's already open for business. Somebody else's business, but that's not a problem.

Unfortunately, plutocrats are not re-licensed every few years to make sure they're still mentally competent.

Trump completely blindsided everyone with that idea. He hadn't consulted anyone about it - Cabinet, State, Defense. I almost felt for him, when he said that Gaza is a living hell, because it plainly is. But in terms of realpolitik, it's plainly a non-starter. The fact that he can broach such far-reaching ideas by way of almost-casual remarks ('Hey, how about we....') beggars belief.

More to the point, NY Times lists all of the definitely or possibly illegal actions Trusk has taken since Inauguration.

Musk hasn't totally destroyed Twitter yet — Count Timothy von Icarus

IN hindsight it seems likely that he only bought Twitter as his personal megaphone. The fact that it's estimated to have lost 75% of its market value doesn't appear to bother him, but then, talk about money to burn.....

Something more alarming is, imagine how deep the DOGE hooks will now be embedded in the IT systems of the Federal Government. I'm sure it's not coincidence that the DOGE troupe are mainly software engineer types. Infiltrating those systems at such a high level of permissions has many profound consequences. And here's the US, worrying about 'foreign actors' hacking their systems (although not worried enough for Congress to complain when Trump moves to retrench virtually the whole of the CIA.)

Ah. I don't think Fannie and Freddie caused the 2008 crisis, though. It was derivatives, right? — frank

It was a lot of things, a real witches brew. The derivatives were a major issue, but it was the entire structure of the US housing and lending market that led to the explosion of derivatives in the first place. You can add in the rating agencies too. But part of the reason that the ratings agencies, pension funds, etc. didn't worry as much as they should have is the idea of the implicit state backing for loans made by the parastatals. — Count Timothy von Icarus

It is true that Freddie and Fannie went along with the excesses (I think both directors were fired), but great example of an totally reckless actor was Countrywide, which basically had it's business model based on perpetually rising housing prices and hence was a top provider of liar loans. But hey, during 1982 and 2003, the company shares got a 23 000% return.

Besides, the real damage of a housing bubble bursting is caused from the fact that robots don't make houses in China, it is builders that make them locally and hence the market have a huge impact on the local economy and in employment. If cryptocurrencies have a devastating crash, then the effect of the crash is limited to that market and the suckers that invested them. Yet buying a home is usually the largest investment a person or a family does: have problems with that and the effect on spending and consumption is huge. Hence the effects of housing bubble bursting are simply devastating for the economy. When there's a speculative housing bubble away and growing, the whole economy of a country looks to be just awesome. Until it isn't.

I think one real issue worth mentioning is just how differently the US government reacted to the financial crisis of 2008 than it acted to the Savings & Loans crisis decades earlier. Simply put it: when it was Wall Street itself, it was socialization of the losses rather than people going to jail (as in the S & L crisis).

So yes, it was a lot of things, but simply stating that it was government run banks makes a dubious argument as if the crisis would/could have been avoided without Freddie Mac & Fannie Mae, which btw officially aren't banks in the normal definition. Yet they are worth mentioning. also.

Of course, today it might be so that the assistance of private actors and corporations might be done totally covertly even without us knowing what is happening. The US is on it's way to functioning like a Third World country in this aspect. Would we know about it, if Tesla was assisted because of falling demand creating losses for the company?

We barely got to know that the whole financial system was on the verge of collapse back then.

It was a lot of things, a real witches brew. The derivatives were a major issue, but it was the entire structure of the US housing and lending market that led to the explosion of derivatives in the first place. You can add in the rating agencies too. But part of the reason that the ratings agencies, pension funds, etc. didn't worry as much as they should have is the idea of the implicit state backing for loans made by the parastatals. — Count Timothy von Icarus

That makes sense. I didn't think about that. I had read that there had never been a significant downturn in housing prices, so people just didn't factor in the possibility of a crash.

I am surprised by the number here who support monarchy. — Paine

There's a scene in the Bible where the people of Israel are asking their judge to name a king. Samuel tells them that in the day they have a king, they will all have become slaves. They insist though, and the Kingdom of Israel is born. They supposedly wanted a king for the sake of warfare.

In this is a recognition that monarchy has a dark side, but the desire for it is coming from the people. King-making is a deep seated drive and this has played out in American history and the presidency has evolved from a minor federal figurehead to something like a king in the sense that the whole political tone changes due to presidential agenda. This is not the result of a nefarious plot. It's because over and over, we found that an integrated, centralized authority can solve problems that the competing states simply can't.

Since the US government is widely considered by Americans to be dysfunctional, it shouldn't be too surprising that monarchy is on some people's minds.

Yes, during corporate takeovers, eliminating duplicate functions and getting rid of unwanted functions is standard operating procedure. Firing FBI agents because they did their jobs is another matter. The decrease in regulatory function by simply removing personnel circumvents the role of Congress as a separate branch of government.

The culture of a professional civil service that curries favor to no party will not be improved by such measures. They will, instead, bring back the patronage system of Tammany Hall.

Exactly. This is why I see it as easily the most disastrous of his plans. The Feds also benefit from a great deal of prestige. People want to work there. They get to recruit from top schools the way big consulting or law firms do, despite paying a fraction of the pay. They are going to lose that.

You can already see how politicization is affecting the state's access to talent in the plunge in military recruitment. If you had told me that the GOP would begin feuding with the military and security services back in 2015 I'd never believe it. It's a case where there really doesn't seem to be any larger trends, just the pettiness of one man.

I also think having a small, fully professional military becomes particularly dangerous when you start heavily politicizing the state. I would rather they return to conscription and citizen soldiers than have a small politicized class dominating defense. One need only look to our nation's police unions to see how that ends. If police unions had the power (e.g. they were also in the military), I think we'd very easily be like the Roman Empire, with security forces demanding massive donatives and overthrowing who ever challenged their impunity or wouldn't pay up.

Already with the fairly limited level of power you see then openly heckling mayors and sheriffs, essentially heckling their commander-in-chief, and being given direct orders from them and replying: "fuck you, 15% raises and we'll talk," or even sometimes "do what we want or we aren't following orders and doing the job we're paid for anymore." But some militaries ARE like that. It's what happens when you let them degenerate.

So yes, it was a lot of things, but simply stating that it was government run banks makes a dubious argument as if the crisis would/could have been avoided without Freddie Mac & Fannie Mae, which btw officially aren't banks in the normal definition. Yet they are worth mentioning. also.

Yes, certainly. I didn't mean to imply otherwise. I brought them up to point out that Obama had very limited options when it came to dealing with the crisis and the idea that bailing out the banks makes him some sort of plutocrat seems off to me. His options were to allow a catastrophic banking sector collapse, or, maybe, the nationalize much of the banking sector. He almost certainly couldn't get legislative approval for the latter though. And at any rate, he DID essentially nationalize two absolutely gigantic banks (granted, they were already quasi-public in a loose way).

The plan was to stop the crisis. The fact that Dodd-Frank and other legislative packages lacked the teeth they might have had has to do with the opposition party blocking more serious reform more than any lack of will from the Administration.

From where shall this anticipated efficiency emerge?

In addition to violating the separation of powers established by the Constitution, the DOGE introduces a plurality of agents where Hamilton argued there should only be one:

But one of the weightiest objections to a plurality in the Executive, and which lies as much against the last as the first plan, is, that it tends to conceal faults and destroy responsibility.

Responsibility is of two kinds to censure and to punishment. The first is the more important of the two, especially in an elective office. Man, in public trust, will much oftener act in such a manner as to render him unworthy of being any longer trusted, than in such a manner as to make him obnoxious to legal punishment. But the multiplication of the Executive adds to the difficulty of detection in either case. It often becomes impossible, amidst mutual accusations, to determine on whom the blame or the punishment of a pernicious measure, or series of pernicious measures, ought really to fall. It is shifted from one to another with so much dexterity, and under such plausible appearances, that the public opinion is left in suspense about the real author. The circumstances which may have led to any national miscarriage or misfortune are sometimes so complicated that, where there are a number of actors who may have had different degrees and kinds of agency, though we may clearly see upon the whole that there has been mismanagement, yet it may be impracticable to pronounce to whose account the evil which may have been incurred is truly chargeable.

``I was overruled by my council. The council were so divided in their opinions that it was impossible to obtain any better resolution on the point.'' These and similar pretexts are constantly at hand, whether true or false. And who is there that will either take the trouble or incur the odium, of a strict scrutiny into the secret springs of the transaction? Should there be found a citizen zealous enough to undertake the unpromising task, if there happen to be collusion between the parties concerned, how easy it is to clothe the circumstances with so much ambiguity, as to render it uncertain what was the precise conduct of any of those parties? — Federalist Paper #70

This captures the peculiar way that Trump says "I, alone can fix it" while never being the cause of any problem. The "buck" of Truman is forever on a cruise ship, playing shuffleboard with the other retirees.

Yet one crucial thing didn't happen during the Financial Crisis of 2008 as did with the S&L crisis earlier is that nobody went to jail. Only one pyramid-schemer turned voluntarily himself in.

This has had very bad long term consequences. In fact, it can be one reason that we have Trump today and we discuss issues on a thread that at first you would think was about a Third World country.

You see, if I'm a banker and you don't have any money and if I this knowing give you 10 million dollars to buy a lavish condo, I am actually doing a crime. I should check if you really have collateral and not simply assume that you are rich, because you are aristocracy, a count. I might think there's no problem, if you cannot pay the debt or even the interest for the 10 million debt, the bank will just take the lavish condo and sell it for a profit, perhaps 12 million in the future. Hey, no risk! And I get my fees instantly from that 10 million loan I sold.

The fact is that with cars people might fancy German cars over American cars and like some brand, but with debt there is no "brand", just how much it will cost me and how large debt can I get for how long. If the majority of customers go to the large bank, then a smaller bank has to take other customers. Perhaps those that don't get loans in other banks. This kind of "aggressive" banking, giving a 10 million "liar-loan" is one way for banks to grow their size, but it's not legal. There are laws against this. However, in 2008 and afterwards, nobody went to jail. Not even from Countrywide (if I am correct). This sent really bad signals both to the financial sector and to the voters. Some reckless bankers getting long term prison sentences would have scared the shit out of Wall Street bankers and gotten more people to think that the system does work. Because they were angry about the socialization of the losses of the rich already.



Hence people then got excited about a billionaire (or a millionaire pretending to be a billionaire back then) who said that the system is corrupt and he knows it, because he has used it. And was surprised how his supporters were excited about slogans like "drain the swamp". And not only do we have him now again as President of the US, but the worlds richest man is happily going around "cutting waste" from the government on a purely executive order bypassing all the rules and the norms. And now some people are enthusiastic about this.

Hamilton was a monarchist. I think the quote you posted is an argument for monarchy. I'm not quite getting your point.