==== date ====
What is the equivalent of legal plunder in society? Using positions in government to create opportunities is pretty
straightforward as the system is well-defined. How does one harvest massive amounts of money from the population without
the ability to tax? A few people - be it Sam Walton or Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk - do it with their talent and hard work.
How do low-quality people with no talent or much else intrinsic value become billionaires? Can you create them and what
would they be useful for besides money? Money is enough as a motive but if you're going to put up the investment you
probably want something more.
Let's call her (it's generally a her for the obvious reasons) Gianna. I don't know of any currently famous entertainer
by that name and one-name celebrities seem to be popular just now. Young or young-looking, at least moderately attractive
(you'd be amazed at how unattractive some of the current pop-tarts are without makeup and carefully managed photography)
and ability to sing is irrelevant thanks to electronics. Don't let non-Autotuned recordings leak but even that isn't fatal.
Have a few of these in circulation at any time and if one starts looking good cultivate it. Once it's a 'thing' put money
into it. Marketing (including guerilla) and tweaking and tuning. Once it's going pour in resources - more marketing, product
development, show setup, armies of costume, makeup, choreographers, producers. Songwriters (in the case of 'singers') and
musicians, show production. You can turn a young or at least young-looking into a mega-star. Set up a 'romance' with someone
of the opposite sex (for now) like another entertainer or professional athlete. You still have to get a reasonably stable
platform and too young is risky - eighteen or nineteen is still pretty much mentally a child and can blow up on you. A
near thirty-something that looks like a teenager - if you don't look too close - should have already shown some red flags.
Our Gianna is like Mountain Dew. A concoction of toxic or at best unhealthy ingredients that tastes good. In fact it tastes
so good that millions of people will drink it, sometimes several times a day. In the case of Gianna your market is teenaged
girls. Teenaged girls don't have much money but their parents do. If you can get the product built up to the point that
Gianna can sell out concerts all over the world you can make a ton of money. Many tons. Gianna can be a billionaire and
you don't miss what she's being paid.
And Gianna can be a useful propaganda tool. Have her promote your socio-political agenda, endorse political candidates.
That didn't work out too well in the
last election
though.
The rap business is even more lucrative, cumulatively anyway. You can take a no-talent and nowhere near attractive (in
fact grotesque can work well) and build the product the same way. Appealing to that market is easier than getting that
subset of middle-class and up suburbia that has teenaged daughters - the parasite class is well funded thanks to the people
who work for a living and buy Gianna concert tickets and merchandise. They can be useful for other things too but that's
another story. When specimens of the underclass are selected and marketed in the same way the result is a being of low
intelligence and minimal morals and no self-control given the money to buy anything and they succumb to the primeval
instincts and lusts and you get something entirely different. Gianna and Melissa and Jordan and Madison and whoever live
the standard showbiz life - a mansion or two or three depending on success, private jets and parties with the other beautiful
people, 'romances' for the gossip websites, and so on. The other types build their own coarse version of Epstein's island
without even the veneer of a normal appearance.
Now, legal plunder can be committed in an infinite number of
ways. Thus we have an infinite number of plans for organizing
it: tariffs, protection, benefits, subsidies, encouragements,
progressive taxation, public schools, guaranteed jobs, guaranteed
profits, minimum wages, a right to relief, a right to the tools
of labor, free credit, and so on, and so on.
-- Frederic Bastiat, The Law
There are two kinds of fools. One says, "This is old, and therefore
good." And one says, " This is new, and therefore better.
-- John Brunner, The Shockwave Rider
