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Notes -
Maybe we should distinguish between state capacity and realized results?
The US has the power to find and remove drug dealers from circulation if it wanted to. If drug addicts can find dealers, so can police. There are open-air drug markets in several US cities, it's not hard to find them. When Xi went to San Francisco they cleaned everything up for him.
The US chooses not to maintain safety in its cities, it chooses not to arrest drug dealers at scale. But when Jan 6th happened, then they actually were serious about jailing the rioters/protesters. They found ways to imprison people who weren't even there and keep them in prison, they stopped messing around.
I think state capacity in the West has declined but not nearly as much as the willingness to use said capacity. There's definitely massive malaise and grifting but there's also a lot of deliberate apathy, that's the anarcho-tyranny part. I think this is dangerous because there are a lot of fairly relaxed policymakers and leaders who know that they're not running things efficiently. They might well think 'if there's a major crisis, we'll rev up the engine to full power and show the world what we can do'. But the engine is rusty and the oil should've been changed ages ago. The state machinery isn't used to high-performance operations anymore, the engine might jam or explode if they try. There'll be a huge performance gap between expectations and reality. It reminds me of how Britain and the United States were thought to be the best prepared for a pandemic at the start of COVID, then everyone ran around like a headless chicken for 6-9 months.
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