Gary Stevenson

So like, yeah, like great argument, Jeff Bezos, like who's going to disagree with you?

And I think this this in itself is the weakness of the argument, you know,

if you suggest that the way to fix something is to do something which absolutely everybody in the country wants to do then you're probably not offering anything particularly of value right like i think you know the population of the uk 66 million

You'd struggle to find 50 people who don't think we should reduce government waste and who don't think we should increase government efficiency and who don't think we should increase government skills.

And it's the same in the US.

Every single politician ever has come in saying we're going to fix this problem by decreasing government waste and improving government efficiency.

So if that was a thing

that you could quite simply just do given that absolutely everybody in the whole world wants to do it we would have already done it by now right and it's it's meaningless but it's popular so once again what you see here is Jeff Bezos

using kind of like weaponizing I guess in a way like a lack of broad economic understanding in the public so in the first case you offer something which is like not really possible which is like how about nobody pays tax and then everybody will be rich

which is great because everybody hates tax and then he says well how about we just like make the government efficient because the government is like rubbish and I'm Jeff Bezos and I will give my skills to the government and this is popular because government is like really really hated and what he's trying to do here is basically set up

an alternative like boogeyman to himself and the billionaires, which is government is shit, tax is shit.

And this is...

Like in many ways, like a good persuasive argument because the bogeyman you are creating is somebody who is already hated.

Everybody hates government and everybody hates taxes.

So he's asked early on in the interview, you know, should rich people pay tax?

And he basically says, you know, these guys are pointing their fingers at me and the billionaires and it's saying my fault.

It's my fault.

But pointing fingers doesn't solve anything.

Basically, what you need to do is replace the government because the government are rubbish and you should get rid of taxes because taxes are rubbish.

which is pointing the fingers in a way that doesn't solve anything because the two things which you have suggested are one thing which is impossible which is to cut taxes on everybody without reducing government services and another thing which absolutely everybody ever has agreed with and tried to do and failed which is to reduce government inefficiency