The Vestan regime is moving with astonishing swiftness from regulating some real or imaginary minor market failure, to regulating everything that moves.
Slow boiling the frog tends to be safer.
Fast boiling the frog, as in 1949, usually results in crisis followed by the government temporarily retreating. Over the years the crisis gets quietly erased from history.
In the US the government has abruptly moved towards European levels of statism and crony capitalism, with the unsurprising result that we now have European levels of unemployment and under employment.
This will probably be partially reversed - and instead of an abrupt move left, it will be back to slow creep left.
There's another factor that might realistically show up in the Vesta arc which makes "
boiling the frog" by statists more difficult.
Perhaps impossible, even if they move like lightning.
In the asteroid belt, there's only microgravity to "nail things down." A government can do horrible-bad-awful-nasty things to people at the bottom of a gravity well because the model thereof ("
A French bastard landing with an armed banditti, and establishing himself king of England against the consent of the natives...," per Thomas Paine) can establish a territorial jurisdiction, and fixed real property can't readily be gotten out from under.
In the asteroid belt, however, pretty much everything is portable. Apply enough delta-Vee and the rock and/or the habitat where you've established your enterprise and domicile can be out of the Vesta "domain" quicker'n you can say "tax exile."
Would these emigrants from Massachusetts be capable of exercising coercive violent force to prevent the Belters of the Vesta cluster from picking up their figurative marbles and leaving for pastures less pestiferous?
Hm. Can a vacuum get any emptier? In space, can anybody hear a statist scream?