[mullingitover]

Beyond a few million a year, the rest of the comp is really providing something that's more difficult to purchase with money: power.

So, while there's a diminishing return on the benefits of additional money in a person's life, a certain subset of people have an insatiable desire for more power. It's problematic in what's supposed to be a democratic society with a fairly flat amount of power distributed among citizens. We essentially recreate a hereditary nobility, which reduces the fitness of our civilization as a whole since we no longer have the most qualified people making the decisions.

[Gormo]

Money only equals political power to the extent that the political power itself is up for sale. Attempting to suppress the acquisition of money via political power will ultimately just create an alternate elite that denominates power via something other than money. The only solution is to reduce the reach of formal political power such that even if it is easier to manipulate it with money, it still can't be used to conduct abuses.

Fundamentally, no one is qualified to make decisions for anyone else in the first place, and the way we ensure the fitness of our civilization is to disaggregate and decentralize power.

[mullingitover]

> Fundamentally, no one is qualified to make decisions for anyone else in the first place, and the way we ensure the fitness of our civilization is to disaggregate and decentralize power.

This just sounds like one of the libertarian greatest hits, and this line of political philosophy is how you end up with bears taking over your town[1].

I think on the contrary, centralized power is necessary, and the solution to the problem of corruption is extreme transparency. Balkanized decision-making is entertaining, but not a sane way to organize a society. Pick competent people, give them the authority to make the decisions that are best for society, and surveil the living hell out of them while they have that authority to prevent abuses. It's not like corruption and abuse of power doesn't exist in small towns, on the contrary I'd say it's worse.

[1] https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/21534416/free-state-...

[Gormo]

> This just sounds like one of the libertarian greatest hits, and this line of political philosophy is how you end up with bears taking over your town[1].

No, it's the way of avoiding having the "bears" take over your town.

> I think on the contrary, centralized power is necessary, and the solution to the problem of corruption is extreme transparency.

Seems very speculative, given the lack of any effective extant mechanism for ensuring extreme transparency; nor does this seem sufficient to counter the inevitable abuses of centralized power should those abuses simply be undertaken transparently, as many of the worst regimes in modern history have done.

> Balkanized decision-making is entertaining, but not a sane way to organize a society.

Quite to the contrary, the only way to effectively organize a society is to make sure that the principle of subsidiarity is respected, since societies can only form and be sustained on the basis of mutual trust negotiated among individuals, and the constant threat of having local decisions overridden by distant strangers inevitably erodes that foundation of trust.

The fundamental mistake you're making is taking society-as-a-single-entity for granted, and not recognizing it as an emergent pattern of ever-fluctuating relations among diverse individuals.

> Pick competent people, give them the authority to make the decisions that are best for society

There are no people competent to make uniform society-spanning decisions, and the idea of encouraging any society to embrace uniform, singular decisions creates massive risk exposure by creating single points of failure that are non-adaptive to change. Evolutionary resilience is a product of variation, and variation is maximized through decentralization.

> It's not like corruption and abuse of power doesn't exist in small towns, on the contrary I'd say it's worse.

All concentrations of power inevitably become corrupt, which is why it's so important to ensure that those concentrations of power are (a) maintained only for matters where it's absolutely necessary, and (b) limited to bounded contexts. Heavy corruption is bad when it's localized, but much worse when it's universalized, and has enough resources to reach into every gap and beyond every frontier which would otherwise be a refuge away from abuses.

[lazide]

So you’re saying the guys like Stalin in the USSR (who only had a couple dachas and nothing too fancy) were better than folks like Putin, because they weren’t greedy?

Or something else?

If you’re arguing having centralized political power is just a huge attractive nuisance, I certainly agree.

But It’s not like HOA’s aren’t a consistent top 10 complaint for people though either.

At least everyone knows what the greedy asshole is after, and it’s ‘only’ money. Usually. At first.

[Gormo]

Stalin used the state to steal literally everything from everyone. That's pretty much the epitome of greed.

Centralized power absolutely is an attractive nuisance, and the idea of creating greater nexuses of centralized power to counter the bad effects of the existing ones is pretty crazy.

[lazide]

Greed is taking things for yourself, which Stalin didn’t really do did he?

He took it and burned it, essentially, rather than steal it.

Which yeah, is arguably worse - but at least no one was able to be jealous after the fact, no? At least at anyone in the country. Which is why it went that way I suspect. Crabs in a bucket. They did seem pretty jealous of the West though, come to think of it. Which would explain a lot.

No one can stand any one party winning (and no party is strong enough to ‘win’), so everyone loses. They’re miserable, but miserable as “equals”. Though typically, even the winners are often poorer and more miserable than the losers would have been under another approach, Except for those who somehow managed to be ‘more equal’ somehow. Weird how that happens.

I think the crazy effect you’re noticing is essentially using fantasy as a coping mechanism.

The current mess is untenable, and we can’t figure out how to make it better (every time we try, we get convincing arguments that we’re at fault somehow or it's not good enough), so surely if we found the ‘good man’ to fix it for us, everything would be great.

But how, one asks? Too difficult to figure out, so you are a bad person for asking - apparently.

Which, uh, yeah, typically isn’t actually going to produce a good outcome, but…. The ‘good man’ says it will all work out, and everyone else seems worse, right?

Personally, I'm wondering if I'm actually being cynical ENOUGH about the current direction things are going in the US.