Shutdown, Day 100 I’m walking through the haze of what still lays claim to be the capital city of the
Shutdown, Day 100
I’m walking through the haze of what still lays claim to be the capital city of the United States of America. The monuments still stand, though graffiti covers a few now. Weeds are starting to poke up in lawns that were once well-tended. Trees and bushes look a bit rangy.
Leviathan bureaucracy has simply… stopped. Or has it? No more IRS audits? No EPA enforcers? Really? Certainly, the endless streams of grants propping up about a third of state spending (along with 1,000 strings—those are gone) but the programs remain, at least in name.
Shutdown, Day 200
Anarcho-capitalists speak of a coming paradise, but in the flickering neon of my neural implant—courtesy of a black-market hack—I saw the edges blurring.
Was this freedom? Or was the simulation unraveling?
The military, those stoic guardians of the Republic, unpaid for months, started to splinter. Enterprising commands offered themselves as mercenaries for hire. In Virginia, a battalion rented themselves to a tech mogul, guarding server farms against looters who mistook data farms for food depots. “Protection services,” they called it, bartering ammo for crypto.
The Lone Star State, seeing opportunity, decreed that active-duty troops on Texan soil would draw from state coffers—filled by oil revenues swelling without federal siphons.
Churches in red states swelled with tithes, now untaxed fortunes, funneled into soup kitchens and orphanages. In Alabama, Pastor Clarke preached, “The Lord provides where Caesar fails,” as congregations pooled resources, feeding the poor with communal farms that bloomed in the absence of regulations.
But in New York, the dream swiftly soured. Comrade-Governor Mamdani, the firebrand socialist, swept into statewide power months earlier on waves of elite discontent, promising a workers’ paradise. “Seize the means!” his rallies thundered, as crowds stormed Wall Street’s empty towers. Yet the production had fled—factories shuttered, supply chains evaporated without federal bailouts. Bread lines snaked through Manhattan, citizens trading heirlooms for scraps. Mamdani’s decrees echoed hollowly: universal income from thin air, but the air made a thin gruel.
Shutdown, Day 500
Out West, Reason Foundation libertarians made their move.
