Banning interests on saving accounts doesn't bother me. No one should harvest money merely because they already have some. Now there's inflation, but those who have little money are largely unaffected. That makes inflation a form of tax on accumulated wealth. I'm fine with that.
I am doubtful that inflation preferentially hurts the well-off. If you're wealthy, you are in a position to put some of your wealth in foreign-denominated assets or commodities or the like. If you are not wealthy, you are really dependent on your employer or pension -- and those don't reliably adjust for inflation. Pensioners, particularly, tend to get clobbered.
Bear in mind that the net-present-value of even modest retirement savings or pensions can be many hundreds of thousands of dollars -- a denomination-limited savings account isn't a good way to store retirement savings. You just can't have "small savings account" as the main method of saving money.
Edit: It also occurs to me that banning interest on savings accounts will just move most individual savings into less-regulated forms. People will buy bonds and suchlike. You can ban banking, but the ability to "harvest money merely because they already have some" is almost the definition of investment. And I don't think you can run a major economy without some way to let people collectively invest their capital in larger projects.
I suppose you could hope to reduce the implicit government guarantee on investments by banning interest on bank accounts, but there's nothing magical about banks -- you can get inflation without fractional reserve banking if the velocity of money increases or if people start using other financial instruments as money substitutes.
Rising prices without a corresponding rise in income isn't true inflation, it's just squeezing your people to get their juice. But it does somewhat emulate inflation.
Yes, it would probably be a bad idea to ban investment. Note however than investment requires effort. Yes, having money makes it much, much, easier to invest, and accumulate even more, but "be able to make money because you have money" is slightly different from "make money because you have money". Though if you pay someone to invest your money…
It occurred to me that our fi...
So I have been checking laws around the world regarding Apostasy. And I have found extremely troubling data on the approach Muslims take to dealing with apostates. In most cases, publicly stating that you do not, in fact, love Big Brother (specifically, that you do not believe in God, the Prophet, or Islam), after having professed the Profession of Faith being adult and sane (otherwise, you were never a Muslim in the first place), will get you killed.
Yes, killed. It's one of the only three things traditional Islamic tribunals hand out death penalties for, the others being murder and adultery.
However, interestingly enough, you are often given three days of detainment to "think it over" and "accept the faith".
Some other countries, though, are more forgiving: you are allowed to be a public apostate. But you are still not allowed to proselytize: that remains a crime (in Morocco it's 15 years of prison, and a flogging). Though proselytism is also a crime if you are not a Muslim. I leave to your imagination how precarious the situation of religious minorities is, in this context.
How little sense all of this makes, from a theological perspective. Forcing someone to "accept the faith" at knife point? Forbidding you from arguing against the Lord's (reputedly) absolutely self-evident and miraculously beautiful Word?
No. These are the patterns of sedition and treason laws. The crime of the Apostate is not one against the Lord (He can take care of Himself, and He certainly can take care of the Apostate) but against the State (existence of a human lord contingent on political regime).
And the lesswronger asks himself: "How is that my concern? Please, get to the point." The point is that the promotion of rationalism faces a terrible obstacle there. We're not talking "God Hates You" placards, or getting fired from your job. We're talking fire range and electric chair.
"Sure," you say, "but rationalism is not about atheism." And you'd be right. It isn't. It's just a very likely conclusion for the rationalist mind to reach, and, also, our cult leader (:P) is a raging, bitter, passionate atheist. That is enough. If word spreads and authorities find out, just peddling HPMOR might get people jailed. And that's not accounting for the hypothetical (cough) case of a young adult reading the Sequences and getting all hotheaded about it and doing something stupid. Like trying to promote our brand of rationality in such hostile terrain.
So, let's take this hypothetical (harrumph) youth. They see irrationality around them, obvious and immense, they see the waste and the pain it causes. They'd like to do something about it. How would you advise them to go about it? Would you advise them to, in fact, do nothing at all?
More importantly, concerning Less Wrong itself, should we try to distance ourselves from atheism and anti-religiousness as such? Is this baggage too inconvenient, or is it too much a part of what we stand for?