Lately, I’ve been thinking more and more about Mike Judge, and how it seems as though he was trying to warn us.
You’ve probably heard of the nineties film, Idiocracy. To summarize: a man was deemed to be completely average. Most relevant to the plot, he had average intelligence. He was then cryogenically suspended for 500 years.
At the time he was released, every other person on earth was so stupid that he was easily the world’s smartest man. It was to the point that people thought that the right way to hydrate the ground for agriculture was with sports drinks, resulting in a famine because they were salting the ground.
The popular notion about natural selection is that it’s survival of the fittest. But that’s actually not true. In reality, it’s survival of the most adapted. And this is still relevant for humans, because a major shift in society brings with it a shift in selection pressures.
Society is in trouble today, for a reason similar to how people ended up stupid in Idiocracy. In current society, selection pressures favor the stupid.
Consider how intelligent people start a family. First, they prepare. They build a career by seeking an education, putting together a resume, then cultivating years of professional experience. They build credit, and look for a home and a car, and in many other ways prepare themselves. It takes years, but they eventually consider themselves viable for the dating market, into which they start to dip their toes. A problem with this approach is that it pisses away some of the most fertile years of one’s life, so by the time they consider themselves ready, they’re probably only going to have a few children, assuming they succeed in finding someone.
Stupid people don’t worry about any of that stuff. They have sex because there’s pleasure involved, then deal with the consequences, ready or not.
As you read through all this, you’re probably wondering what this has to do with the title. How does this relate to late stage taxation?
One thing I learned about people and myself from video games is that people act based on incentive, even if the playstyle results in an experience that’s different from what the game developers intended.
Someone playing Pokémon Gold might want a shiny legendary Pokémon. They might save in front of the Pokémon and soft reset until it appears as a shiny, then go to the frustrating task of trying to catch it, assuming they wouldn’t just huck a valuable Master Ball at it.
They could go to that trouble. Or they could catch an ordinary version of that legendary, arrange a box in a certain way, then use arbitrary code execution to make it shiny, possibly saving many hours.
The incentive is to try to obtain what’s desirable in little time, even if it means that the game is being played differently from how the developers intended.
This holds true in life, as well. When you account for incentives, people become a lot more predictable.
The political class is one example. If an incentive exists for them to pursue a certain policy, they can be counted on to pursue that policy. They might do this even if the result is a society with undesirable selection pressures, especially if they can avoid the brunt of those consequences.
For a politician, the incentive lies with whatever gets them more votes. This is easy to accomplish with entitlement programs. For one thing, the people who act on incentive to accept these programs are also incentivized to vote for the politician who enabled them.
What’s more, it’s a snap for that politician to maintain good optics with such a show of altruism. Of course, it’s not true altruism because it’s being funded through the coercion that is taxation, taking from those who actually produced value. However, there are multiple layers of abstraction separating the coercion from the false altruism, allowing everyone involved to maintain plausible deniability.
This is all pretty bad. But it gets worse. There are three parties with an incentive to increase entitlement programs further, as well as the number of people on the government dole:
- Politicians, because they recognize that if people have an incentive to vote for them (free stuff), they’ll do so, cementing more power around those politicians,
- The bureaucratic state, because as more people are getting free stuff, there will be more money to scrape away to pay those who manage it, and
- Ordinary people, because they’d be getting more and more free stuff, without having to pay for it.
In fact, someone is paying for it: the productive class. Their incentive is to resist this massive theft. But as the political class have more and more people legally bribed, the productive class can do less and less about it.
And as the incentive to join the productive class dwindles, fewer people will want to join it. But as this happens, less is produced. Thus, there is less value to extract from the few left who are actually producing it.
As working Americans’ paychecks are being taxed into a black hole, they’re being convinced that they didn’t start a family when they wanted to due to a failure on their part.
All this is a recipe for a collapse of a society, which is the expected outcome as this continues.
As the birth rates of native populations collapses, politicians don’t take accountability for their contributions to the problem. That is not where their incentives lie. Rather, their incentive is to further expand their political power by replacing the native population with a migrant population, whose loyalty can be bought with value extracted from the already distressed native population.
Thus, the productive class who are already heavily taxed have a far more backbreaking burden placed upon them.
We already have a publicized example of what can happen when such corruption reaches an advanced state: the recently publicized Minnesota Somali entitlement scams. As was famously exposed by a citizen journalist, entire buildings had numerous empty daycare and Medicare offices, which weren’t doing much of anything, and all refused to assist the journalist in their respective alleged professional capacities. All while still accepting millions of dollars in funding taken from taxpayers.
One of which, famously, misspelled the word “Learning” on its sign.
This brought national attention to how funds are being misallocated in Minnesota. Minnesota governor Tim Walz dropped out of the race for reelection shortly afterwards, which wasn’t great optics for him.
To think that guy could have been the Vice President of the United States.
While the whole matter got widespread attention on social media, and action has been taken concerning this massive fraud, we’d be dreaming if we thought that something similar wasn’t happening all over the country, and not necessarily involving the same ethnic group.
In fact, this can be stated with almost complete confidence. Why? Because the leftist establishment involved with the Somali daycare fraud were acting on incentive, and the incentives to try something similar exists elsewhere, too. And when it comes to incentive, people are predictable.
I’ve mentioned intelligence and Somalis in the same article, I suppose I can give my opinion of Somali intelligence, seeing as it’s topical. Personally, I don’t see it as being as relevant as people make it out to be. After all, fraud is fraud, regardless of the intelligence of the person who commits it.
When I heard it said that the average IQ of a Somalian is 67, I was skeptical. After all, this is over two standard deviations below the mean, and well below the point where a person is too low to be allowed in the US armed forces. This is because it’s prohibitively difficult to train such a person to the point that they can carry out their duties autonomously.
Just imagine the implications for such a person if they were to attempt to enter the workforce. What is society supposed to do with such a person? It seems much of us have decided to grant them the means to live in relative comfort.
Even if one were to accept that intelligence has a genetic component, which seems to be the case, that there would be an entire country of people where most are low IQ to the point of being handicapped is a stretch to accept.
But it seems as though, whatever the intelligence of Somalis happens to be, this intelligence isn’t what was considered when the administrative state decided to use them as a pretext for extracting more wealth from productive Americans, or when Democrats decided to attempt to exploit them for votes, building power for themselves. But those same Somalis are predictable if they decided to move somewhere where they’d be given plenty of money, even if they accomplished nothing.
To be honest, I care less about the stupidity of Somalis than I do about the stupidity of Americans. And considering that there are Americans who are not only okay with the fraud, but are committing the felony of obstructing federal officers because they want it to continue, I imagine that our ancestors in their mud huts would wonder where things went wrong.
But tell them how selection pressures in late stage taxation favors the stupid, they’d probably wonder why anyone would allow matters to get to this point.
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Magnetricity 