if you live off canned food by yourself in an underground bunker with no sunlight and no internet, you will surely have a lot of privacy.
Privacy is something you want when needed, not as an end in itself.
If you optimize for surviving the worst dystopian outcomes, you probably won’t be in great shape for more likely ones.
And you might even be contributing to (and via the desire for cognitive consonance) helping the worst ones along.
Whatever the prevailing narrative is around the issue du jour, it’s probably bullshit, and the way people are framing it is the way they were manipulated to frame it.
One solution is to think for yourself, but the better one is to decide what to think ABOUT for yourself.
Be like the Amish during covid who were not watching TV. You can’t comply with something if you don’t even know what you’re being asked to comply with.
Copying from a Twitter post I made today:
Being wealthy is just having the power to allocate capital. The question is who we want doing that -- those who have accumulated it via the market, or those who have accumulated it via politics.
Of course, crony capitalism is a hybrid that disguises political accrual of capital as market-based, but ask yourself whether that problem increases or decreases the more we transfer capital into the hands of political actors.
In an ideal world, those who accumulate capital and have the power to allocate it got that power by providing value to people who voluntarily traded small bits of capital for that value.
It seems obvious then we want capital allocation to be in the hands of those who create value for people, rather than in those who got it via politics.
Socialists who redistribute capital for political gain are not offering value via voluntary exchange, but via top-down edict.
Capital *might* be more evenly distributed, short term, in a socialist society but by "evenly distributed" it means more people have less control over resources, while the political class (and those closely connected to it) have far more.
Moreover, it's a recipe for much less total capital available for society as a whole, as individuals allocating capital top-down are far less efficient in creating new capital and effectively distributing it than a market comprised of millions making individual choices about what they want.
I would rather live in a wealthier society that lets the market choose "winners" and "losers" than a poorer society that ensures everyone except the political class and its cronies are losers.
Finally, with respect to social safety nets, I understand why people don't want to rely on the "beneficence" of the wealthy, but the "beneficence" of the state is equally suspect. (Look at the rampant homelessness in CA, for example, that allocated $24B allegedly to "remedy" the problem.)
In the end, I suspect it would be easier to persuade the wealthy it's in their interest to cough up say 10 percent of their capital voluntarily, then to force people to give up north of 50 percent in a much poorer society, for example.
The richer and more innovative a society is, the more trivial it is for them to provide for everyone's needs. The poorer and more regulated society, wherein the government disincentivizes innovation and crudely redistributes, has to strain to provide for its most needy.
Bottom line -- capital should be in the hands of those who have earned it via value creation, not those who have stolen it by violence-backed wealth-seizure. I would rather live in an unequal via wealth (though equal via civil rights) society where the poorest have what they need than a more equal one where that equality is based on collective poverty.
Unfortunately there is no third choice wherein wealth distribution can be made more equal by forced redistribution and prosperity still accrues to society as a whole. It's not the fault of the rich, but of reality itself -- it favors the wisdom of the market, comprised of millions, over the top-down edicts of the politbureaus. If you don't like it, take it up with reality (God, evolution, the universe, the Tao, whatever you want to call it.) We must deal with the way things are not the way we might wish them to be.
