When the federal government “shuts down,” roughly 85% of operations continue automatically, extracting your wealth and expanding federal power with or without congressional approval.

The only thing that genuinely stops is the theatre. For a brief moment, left and right can’t perform their daily kabuki about helping you while they jointly expand the money supply, accumulate $37 trillion in debt, maintain over 750 overseas military bases, grow the regulatory state, and surveil citizens without warrants. The “shutdown” reveals the truth: the system isn’t designed to stop. It’s designed to extract, expand, and perpetuate.

The performance ends. The extraction continues. That’s not a bug, it’s the feature.