Id totally pay that if Id be left alone from all this stupid compliance bs.
100% this multiplied by infinity! There is something inherently wrong when a person who adds NOTHING to our business feels they are entitled to a large piece of our business!
When I was a little child, we used to take family vacation trips to Sicily to visit some of my father's relatives. I had one aunt in particular, Rosa, who worked part-time cleaning the tax offices and making coffee for the "wannabes." Her mother also worked part-time for the "government" at the Palazzo dei Normanni a Palermo.
The following story was told to me numerous times when I was a kid, and I think it was to inculcate certain "warnings". My relatives there knew a professor (working class, too, but smart AH) who wrote a little book. I can't remember the title of the book, and I've tried, so maybe
@JohnnyDoe can enlighten us.
The gist was this:
The mafia began, more or less, because of Sicily's oppressive and corrupt "government." There was no way for average people to make their own way unless they were related/connected to the local "government," which was utterly corrupt and a social club for the "delusional self-proclaimed elite." So, citizens banded together and started "our thing" (La Cosa Nostra) because the only way to halfway function and survive was outside the biased, self-serving, and corrupt "laws" imposed by the delusional, useless, unproductive, self-appointed "ruling" class who scribbled BS on paper, did a ritual, and then called it "laws."
The professor wrote a book about this. In essence, he breaks down how the Cosa Nostra was charging 5% to make sure everything worked fine, and the "greedy necktie b@$t@rd$" came in, fought them, and used pejorative terms like the Mafia, only to later enact "laws" where they now charge ~50% and don't do anything in return.
So, when I see such a documentary (Financial Times vis-à-vis Chinese), I immediately remember my Aunt Rosa, her mother, and that professor, along with all my other relatives there who used to complain about the people in the documentary. They want that money so they can shave +50% for themselves and their buddies, and nobody bats an eye on this obvious self-interest!
Somehow, SIMPS in society STILL prefer to s*ck the b@ll$ of these useless, unproductive parasites, robbing them and not giving them anything in return but complaining about people (i.e., the Chinese in the documentary) making their lives easy! Like WTF???!!!
What am I missing? What kind of low self-esteem people are these?
EDIT: I fixed some of my grammar and punctuation so my deceased mom, who was a (part-time) English and French teacher, won't pull my leg at night.