Slavery : the best thing for you. No, seriously.

金瓶梅 is a Chinese novel by one 蘭陵笑笑生. The title would roughly translate to Romanian as Lotus de aur, Vaza si Prunisor de Primavara, whereas the auctorial pseudonmy as Carturarul mucalit de pe magura cu magnolii. It's a great book, predating Balzac by a good four centuries, because as you well know everything of value was invented by Europeans : the banknote, gunpowder, the steam engine, alchemy and so on and so forth. You should read it in any case.

Among the important matters it deals with (principally, the psychosexual struggles of six wives in a guy's harem) there's some discussion of secondary matter, such as the dispensation of justice. The social climber that owns enough not only to keep half a dozen women as his own but more importantly to keep someone busy writing a book about him makes the stunning point that selling the act of aportioning justice is a poor heuristic. Not quite what you'd expect, in the circumstances.

It is nevertheless a very valid point. And now, let's consider a different angle.

Adlai TL;DR of Chomsky's interview: Had the people in the 1950s had been asked, "Do you want your taxes to go to development of the kind of technology that will allow your grandchildren to have iPads or do you want your taxes to go into a livable society? Health care, education, places where people can have decent lives? And so on. What would people have decided? Well, whatever the answer was, they didn't have an answer because they never had a choice.
mircea_popescu This idea that "people" should have "a choice" is bullshit of the first degree. They had all the choices they can meaningfully have. Go to work or don't. Read or don't read, beat your wife or don't beat your wife, whatever. If the end result sucks, it's because they suck. That's all.

Adlai Eh, I don't think it has to be bullshit, it's just bullshit in the current way government is conducted. If government were structured as a business selling services to citizens, they could choose what to "invest" in.
mircea_popescu We readily agree, provided by "current way government is conducted" you mean "pencil dicks who chiefly need the government to steal from others and give them part of the proceeds as a means of support derp about how to formalise choice". What the fuck, "the answer was". Chomsky conveniently forgets all the problems inherent in FORMALISNG these problems, in speech ? What is this, senility day, Buffett structures his business so as to avoid tax then derps that he pays less than his secretary so his middle management should be taxed more and Chomsky proposes people be ASKED ?! Like how, orally ? He's not yet come up with a way to ask people how intelligent they are. What the fuck.

ThickAsThieves I gotta agree, if thats the TLDR of Chomsky's thing, it's useless babble at best. Sounds like a horrible drunken philosophy conversation, inventing moments of choice in the past.ⁱ
mircea_popescu Exactly.

Adlai My takeaway from it is that he's disappointed with how [his] government has mishandled tax money over the past decades, and disappointed in how "intellectuals" have been unable to steer government towards benefitting anybody other than aforementioned pencildicks.
mircea_popescu That's what "chomksy" means. "Disappointed over how the people running his ideology apportion the proceeds of the theft that ideology entails".

ThickAsThieves Well how can we social media and SEO while making important choices about the past?
Adlai Although I must say, they're not really pencildicked if they've managed to fool so many people so much of the time
mircea_popescu That's what pencil dicks are : those who attempt to fool people as a means to existence. See, they need to, because pencil dick.ⁱⁱ

Adlai They're not just attempting though, they're vastly successful at it.
mircea_popescu Yes, but failure is no defense.

Adlai Practically speaking, it doesn't matter if they're pencildicked or horsecocked, they're still raping our children.
mircea_popescu But anyway, all this aside, let's put to bed the "if government were structured as a business selling services to citizens, they could choose what to "invest" in" idiocy. Yes, they would.
ThickAsThieves And they'd be wrong, too.

Adlai Well we probably wouldn't call it "government" at that point. We'd just call it "that company that handles my health insurance", or "that company that pays the garbage guy".
mircea_popescu Well... the forum is investing, ain't it ? The solution is to remove all the means to choice from the mass. They shouldn't have moneyⁱⁱⁱ, or the vote, or for that matter be able to read at all. They should find a master when old enough to interest anyone, and live thus, as slaves.
ThickAsThieves Crowds are horrible at decisions. Exponentially too. Even a 12-person board can ruin a company led by a masterful CEO.

* Adlai was toying the other day with an alternate world where everybody is born into indentured servitude, but can buy their way to freedom once they've saved up enough
mircea_popescu Something like that, but not exactly money based. WoT based. When enough people trust you (people!!! not fucktards/slaves), you emancipate.

[derpage about good cinematic ideas poorly implemented by puritans because puritans]

mircea_popescu But seriously, I wouldn't do tokens. Let it be wot trust, it's the correct solution. Not tokenisable^iv.
Adlai Isn't currency just a fungible trust system though?

mircea_popescu Not at all.
danielpbarron If assbot l2 goes under -10, you die?

mircea_popescu No, you just shut the fuck up.
Adlai No, you just have to beg for food in a different IRC channel.

It's not just the dispensation of justice that works poorly on a monetary heuristic, it's also the allocation of sovereignity that works poorly on a monetary heuristic. Which happens to be why simony was condemned by the (at the time sovereign) catholic church, and so on and so forth.

Money works best for comparing like things. Like. Things. Money does not work to compare the unlike, or people who are not things (some people are things, and them being bought and sold like any other item, on the open market, is perfectly fine). So therefore, "money everything" isn't a solution. There's a reason the complete economic theory doesn't simply read "Money. Moneymoneymoneymoneymoney moneymoneymoney!1"

PS. Appropos of nothing in particular :

1. Guy knows all about it, starting with "If only I had bought here and sold here and... [↩]
2. Think about it, the phantasm of ulterior satisfaction only exists in the first place because a) instant satisfaction is not available which b) gives the unsatisfactory plenty of time to come up with something else. The satisfactory people are busy satisfying while unsatisfactory mope around trying to think up some sort of "I have a great sense of humor and this jerk doesn't *really* respect you anyway". [↩]
3. Because if they have money, they create perverse incentives. It costs ten bucks to come up with yet another Britney Spears, and if you get a million idiots to pay you a buck a head your returns are 10`000`000%. On the other hand it costs a hundred bucks to put up a good show, and in the unlikely case you find five thousand guys to pay a hundred each you'll barely reach 500`000%. Even if offering a fair deal (100 in cash for 100 in value) instead of a bum deal (1 in cash for no value), the sheer power of the mass of idiots and the small change problem ensure that your time is most efficiently employed chasing dimes from idiots. [↩]
4. This is why "total trust" is meaningless, you see. [↩]