Gary Stevenson

And he kind of floats this idea that government spending at the moment is wasteful.

It's inefficient.

I'm really interested in his repeated use of this term skills issue, which I'll get into a little bit more later.

And once again, what you have is an argument which

on the surface is appealing and the reason that it's appealing is because

Everyone hates government.

It's becoming more and more widely accepted in public opinion that politicians are like dickheads and governments are wasteful.

So like, yeah, like, you know, of course, like we want to reduce government waste and we want to increase government inefficiency and we want to improve government skills.

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...