The profit motive is transparent and it is something that is easy to track down than "doing good", which is as the general goal of government far less transparent. As a citizen in a prosperous society you could easily start lobbying among other share holders to spend their own money to set up new charity foundations or have existing ones re-evaluate their goals.

Many government programs provide services to people who can't afford the the value of the service provided. Police and public education provided to inner-cities cannot be paid from the wealth of the beneficiaries. Moldbug complains about the inefficiency of the post office, but that problem is entirely caused by non-efficiency based commitments like delivering mail to middle-of-nowhere small towns. Without those constraints, USPS looks more like FedEx. That's not a Moldbuggian insght - everyone who's spent a reasonable amount of time thinking about the issue knows this trade-off.

He says robot armies and cryptographically locked weaponry eliminate the need to care about what your population thinks. The technology simply wasn't there in the time of Louis XIV. The governing structure has no need to mess with people's minds in various ways to convince them it is a just system.

And I simply don't believe this is a likely outcome. There will be times when a realm does not want to use its full arsenal of unobtanium weapons (i.e. to deal with jaywalking and speeding). Anyway, isn't it easier (and more efficient) to use social engineering to suppress populist sedition?

The US defeated the Soviet Union . . .

I mostly agree with your analysis, in that I think we've been lucky in some sense that the good guys won. But doesn't Moldbug have some totally different explanation for the Cold War, involving infighting between the US State Dept. and the Pentagon?

He also seems very confident that if his proposed form of government was enacted somewhere it would drastically out-compete all existing ones.

I think it likely that any system of government backed by unobtanium weapons would defeat any existing government system. It's not clear to me that a consent-of-the-governed system backed by the super weapons wouldn't beat Moldbug's absolutist system. And even if that isn't true, why should we want a return to absolutism. It's painfully obvious to me that my rejection of absolutism is the basis of most of my disagreement with Moldbug. I think government should provide "unprofitable" services, and he doesn't.