I am not a fan of the French revolutionary mob at all, but they did offer some negative incentives to the power structure functionaries of their day that didn't involve paying anyone off. On the other hand, just paying the drones to actually do nothing, as many of them aspire to do anyway, would be a major improvement over what we have now. The key concept, as I see it, is that the craven, weak, and dull majority will always need an external authority to order their lives. The only questions are 1) who shall constitute that authority, and 2) what shall their ruling philosophy be.
