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Producers would like to get the most money for the least effort. Thus, they abuse lock-in and network effects to squeeze their consumers, converging on a minimum viable product. Okay, neat.
In your analogy, the government is the producer. It’s also the product, via its services, and the money, via kickbacks and sinecures. This is incoherent because shittification is not about self-licking ice cream cones. It’s about market capture, and markets have never been a good description of governments.
What is the equivalent of creating a new firm? And how exactly was a free, socialist-hating media supposed to enshrine it? Americans didn’t stay in America because academics were willing to denounce Hitler and Stalin. They stayed because dictators are bad for business. They stayed, voted in leftists and rightists, and won the Cold War.
American socialism was strongest in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Same for fascism. They rose and fell in the time of this amazing free enterprise, because it turns out your enemies get to use the pulpit, too.
You’re looking for reasons to caricature your enemies. This theory isn’t a very good one.
The analogy of the OP seems apt.
Companies and bureaucracies tend (over time) to increase their own power at the expense of the people they nominally serve. This could take the form of higher prices or higher taxes.
The only thing that keeps the system working is competition. But when regulatory capture locks out competition, things will become enshittified. The same thing has happened in states that have transitioned from somewhat robust democracies into one-party states. California comes to mind here.
This is of course not limited to liberalism. A conservative one party state could have the same effect.
But parties aren’t competing to provide the same good. Outside of the smallest offices, there’s all this baggage of policy planks and national networks.
The analogy to buying from a different company isn’t voting differently. It’s moving to a country with similar politics. Possible, but a high bar which I wouldn’t expect to decide the issue.
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