> loyalty and deep pockets

There's a long diatribe there, basically lifted straight from Plato's Republic, starting with democracy being the second-worst method of governing a country, and the search for a Strong Man. Sadly, mankind seems to need to relearn this lesson, the hard way, twice a century or so.

To a lesser extent, the same is true for companies. Boeing is being driven to breaking point by the bean counters in the board room who value share price maintenance over engineering excellence, and indulge in empty-calorie tactics like share buy-back; Intel is discovering that "lobbying dollars offer a better return than engineering dollars" (to quote RISKS-34.48) only gets you so far before you start having to lay off workers. And once the talent's gone, it's *gone*; witness the state of Twitter after Agent X sacked it.*

Spread this across the entire country; add in trade tariffs being passed on to the consumer (Brexit is costing the UK 4--5% a year in GDP), the enormous cost of deporting anybody considered "foreign", and the flight of talent to less extreme countries (which has already started). The 2008 crash will seem like a picnic.

* For some months after the sack, all The Register could get out of Twitter's press e-mail address was a poop-emoji autoreply. I've no idea whether setting that up was the last press officer's last act before turning out the lights, but it was karmically correct.