The stronger you make the government, the stronger you make lawyers. Lawyers make their living by applying law to human interactions. The more laws that apply to human interaction, the more powerful government officials become. This is why they inherently have no self-restraint. There is no interest in curtailing legal reach, which can only be limited by police power. AI automates police power, making for unlimited government power. Call this force The Borg.
Like the villains in Star Trek: The Next Generation, they are a self-propagating, all-consuming force. They are a virus or a gray goo scenario (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_goo). The lawyers, cops, politicians, government employees, government contractors, and government vendors all benefit from this system at the expense of everyone else.
They operate exactly like The Borg. They are a sterile entity that exists to make efficiencies to serve its own propagation. It must absorb all outsiders in order to thrive. It is not just San Francisco's government that seeks to tax its productive citizens into penury for the sake of government employees. This is a global template. The government uses problems as a pretext to expand itself and pay for more government employees. The problem must not get solved. Whether it's the war on drugs, Ukraine, Afghanistan, or homelessness.
Previously capital served as a check against the government. Capital has swapped out the middle class for the government as its servant. Previously intellectuals served as a check against them. This is why computation has been pushed for the last thirty years despite having lower yields than space technology. By creating a machine to steal intellectual property in a manner that resembles a flash-loan attack, the intellectual has been circumvented.
The programmer is the willing dupe in all of this. They claim moral neutrality, but are the SS stormtroopers of this Borg regime. They are well compensated in order to compromise any morality they might have had. By aligning their interests with The Borg, the programmer class is co-opted and will not rebel or fight against the overwhelming forces of totalitarian capital, even if it only requires a significant minority to take a stand.
San Francisco proves that every item on the liberal wish list is used to make life terrible and that the government is psychopathic and will use your morality against you. It is a government that will use any pretext in order to enlarge itself and expand its powers, until all serve it. Their state of peace is a constant state of war for everyone else.
This is known as lawfare.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawfare
The extreme poor are used to attack the middle class, to keep the middle class from focusing on the ultra wealthy.
And the goal is to assimilate you, financialize you, and own you.
"Who's Gonna Save Me?!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ofrqm6-LCqs
:-)