&quot;Implicit in the statement &quot;giving people what they want&quot; is a set of assumptions about what &quot;want&quot; means.&quot;<p>And while that&#x27;s all very interesting and important in the abstract, it&#x27;s worth double-checking that you don&#x27;t get yourself lost in the weeds... which I think you did... and forget that the paperclip maximizer is scary precisely because it has <i>no</i> concept of wants in it. With capitalism, wants can be changed in real time, and the system reacts. The paperclip maximizer does not. They are fundamentally different.<p>There is a memeset that strongly encourages you to fling up whatever word smokescreen is necessary to ensure that nothing positive is said about Emmanual Goldstein, today played by Capitalism, but it&#x27;s still just a word smokescreen. There is a fundamental different between a paperclip maximizer and capitalism, and you should not throw yourself into a word tizzy until you&#x27;ve confused your rational brain enough that you can fall back on the comfortable emotional judgments about capitalism. Not every bad thing that can be said about capitalism is true simply because it&#x27;s a bad thing said about capitalism.