bogus_323423

How dare people try to get ahead in ways I find repellent. They clearly must be coerced into doing it, so let's coerce them into not doing it.

It attracts trashy people and tweakers! They should abuse prescription drugs and wear the respectable fashion and be mannerly like upper class people such as myself.

Mote, meet beam. I'm sure we can whip the sinners into virtue and establish the true city on the hill.

We may not like the criminal underworld, but the cure is worse than the disease.

> we must make them be good

Lash the sinners into virtue, eh?

Good luck with the whole killing satan with his own pitchfork thing. All this does is turn those who try into demons; if you can hurt class enemies for being insufficiently good, you can do the same to anyone. And nobody ever accused the proletariat of being excessively possessed of virtue...

This is just a thin veneer over the libido dominandi. "We can't wait to remake society in the image of the blood god, so sacrifices must be made. No, not my kids ha ha"

This is not a coincidence, given fascism was a mutant heresy of syndicalism (which itself is one of the many marxist flavors). Look into D'annuzio and the various other ideological influences on Mussolini and it's not hard to figure out why Fascists loved totalitarianism and central planning as much as the mainstream marxists in Russia did.

The story is not much different in Germany. Same fruit of a poisoned tree.

There has never been a society wherein the most productive do not bear the majority of the costs. This is simply due to necessity; nothing else is possible.

At the least they also have the most say in how society is run, given money is the deciding factor in electoral politics such as ours. Were sortition or some other noncorrupt means of choosing rulers used, this would actually be an unfair arrangement. I suspect this is why oligarchy such as ours is so popular; it recognizes the reality of elites while creating the illusion of popular legitimacy.

Government is "sticky". War taxes stick around long after the end of the war, and city bureaucracies stick around long after a city declines.

Nobody wants to accept that maybe a town of 5-20k people don't need 20-100 man police forces, and a far lower level of public services in general.

Nobody wants to admit they have to lower their standards of living in the face of adversity; instead we double-down on reproducing (or improving on) the standard of living of our forebears and thereby immiserate ourselves with the debts (or oppression in this case) needed to square that circle.

Even the most economically irrelevant areas of rural america have paved roads these days when they could simply have stuck with gravel, etc. In many ways we are trying to exceed the prior standard of living (progress!) all the while forgetting that the economic base of most of these places has either not improved or significantly worsened.

We all increase our standards of living at our own peril; one must save and capitalize first (which is actively punished by low interest rate policy). Taking this as a given, should we have expected any other outcome?

There are always ways around the law for those creative enough. All it takes is one unregulated launch to put up a 'cold' ICBM in orbit, which would be effective insurance against any and all regulatory action. It's a vicious sort of realpolitik, but it would likely work.

Just wait until someone surreptitiously puts up a whole network of sleeper nukes into orbit. One weird trick to become world emperor, eh?

A good sci-fi plot, since it's likely do-able by private firms in the near to medium term.

That said there are more mundane ways to escape. However those come with their own risks (ask Gerald Bull how his attempt turned out).