"Small government" sounds comforting — a tidy garden where everyone minds their own business and freedom magically flourishes.

But while we're admiring the gnomes, something much bigger is climbing over the fence.

This week on The Bigfoot Manifesto, host Dave Pederson is joined by David Dayen, executive editor of The American Prospect and one of the sharpest reporters covering power, policy, and corporate capture in America today.

Together, they dismantle one of the most durable fairy tales in U.S. politics: the idea that shrinking government somehow shrinks greed.

From deregulation and austerity to Wall Street bailouts, healthcare profiteering, and the quiet consolidation of power, Dayen explains how "small government" rhetoric doesn't remove control — it transfers it. Markets don't become freer. They become dominated. Accountability doesn't disappear. It just moves out of public view.

The conversation digs into:

• Why "small government" remains politically seductive despite repeated failure

• How deregulation actually works in practice — not theory

• Why austerity is a policy choice, not an economic necessity

• How corporate power fills every vacuum government leaves behind

• Why crises are so often used to justify cutting the systems people rely on

Bigfoot may be fictional — but the damage caused by policy myths is very real.

David Dayen is the executive editor of The American Prospect and an award-winning journalist who has spent decades investigating corporate power, financial corruption, and public policy failures. His reporting has helped expose foreclosure fraud, monopolization, and the quiet mechanisms that allow wealth and influence to concentrate at the top.

📰 The American Prospect
https://prospect.org/

📘 Chain of Title: How Three Ordinary Americans Uncovered Wall Street's Great Foreclosure Fraud
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1620970393

📕 Monopolized: Life in the Age of Corporate Power
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1620974550

🎙 The Bigfoot Manifesto

Gentrification isn't "organic change." It isn't inevitable. And it definitely isn't caused by coffee shops.

In this episode of The Bigfoot Manifesto, we're joined by housing policy expert and author Samuel Stein to unpack how gentrification is built—by policy, finance, zoning laws, tax incentives, and real estate speculation—and why cities keep feeding a system that displaces the very people they claim to protect.

Using the metaphor of Frankenstein's monster, we explore how housing stopped being shelter and became a governing force, how cities quietly handed power to real estate markets, and why rising property values are treated as "success" even as communities are pushed out.

• How real estate became a political actor
• Why cities depend on speculation for survival
• The contradiction between rising property values and affordable housing
• Zoning, tax breaks, and development subsidies that fuel displacement
• Why homelessness and gentrification are policy outcomes—not accidents
• Whether cities can be governed democratically when capital is mobile

If you care about housing justice, rent control, zoning policy, urban planning, inequality, real estate capitalism, or the future of cities, this episode is essential listening.

Samuel Stein is a housing policy expert, urban planner, and author of Capital City, a definitive breakdown of how real estate finance shapes cities and democracy.

🔗 Samuel Stein (official site):
https://samuelstein.org

📘 Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State (Verso Books):
https://www.versobooks.com/products/282-capital-city

📕 A Right to Housing? — forthcoming from Verso Books (September 2026)

The Bigfoot Manifesto blends progressive politics, sharp satire, and investigative storytelling—because believing in Bigfoot makes more sense than believing housing markets will fix themselves.

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🦶 Smash capitalism gently, one cryptid metaphor at a time