Advertising is devastating to my well-being

I said that if such behavior ever became the norm, the human race would die. As of now, only a small portion of humans behave this way. This happy fact enables humans to survive.

However, on the basis of your comment I will scale back my argument a bit. It might be possible for some humans to survive in a movie fantasy post-apocalyptic world of pure rampaging feral aggression. But the number would be very few. It would consist of a few people picking berries and hunting rabbits in secret, and gangs of others occasionally sniffing them out and looting them.

In reality, in order for a human being to survive, he must have things and services produced by other humans. He can't do it all himself. If he wants to ensure that other humans continue to produce the things he needs, the best way is to offer something in return.

Certainly voluntary trade is not his only option. He could plead hardship and gain some sympathy that way. He could commit fraud, deceiving others into giving him what he wants. He could use force to take what he wants.

But ultimately all of these options are limited and fraught with risks of their own. Why risk death when you can just wash a few dishes instead?

So yes, humans have been doing stupid evil things for as long as there have been humans, and they will continue to do so. My point is, stupidity and evil are not sustainable or reliable methods for achieving life, happiness, health, and wealth. That is why they are called "stupid" and "evil."

This is Econ 101 dogma. I'm surprised you can write this without examining it further. People are not rational actors. That's why advertising works.

What's particularly interesting about your using this argument is that advertising exists precisely to manipulate the non-rational decision making of consumers.

Once we realize that humans in general are wired such that they make certain cognitive mistakes again, and again, we have to modify our understanding of a "freely contracted trade".

A trade where I take advantage of your human nature to encourage you to make a decision that is in my interest is not truly freely-entered.

With respect to your tax rant ... you should know that people respond more to what is annoying or vivid than to longer term considerations.

Ads are a low-grade but constant irritation, whereas I make enough money that taxes are just some numbers on paper.

Adblock is like Napster. People want the content; the vast majority of publishers only have one business model; a lot of consumers doesn't like the price they're being asked for the benefit they're getting, and many of them are willing to take the content without paying.

There are always people who won't pay no matter what - in the music world, filesharing is still around. But a lot of people started paying for music again when Amazon and Apple and eMusic changed the price structure to something they were willing to pay.

There are a few sites like LiveJournal and MetaFilter that have ad-free options for paid users. Maybe this is a small niche and will never be big business. But maybe there are a lot more user who would pay to support ad-free content - if the price is right.

Pay per click ads aren't generally worth enough money to sustain sites that produce content. Aggregators, search engines, social networks, etc, have a much, much lower cost per pageview, and can do pretty well. On Ars, we'd need to average about 50,000 pageviews per normal post to pay the writer for it with something like Google AdSense. And that's assuming that the campaigns AdSense picks are pretty good.

There are whitepaper links and stuff you can get much better CPC rates for, but those generally only work if you're sneaky about them and embed them in content, or make them look like site resources.