Tourist2008 said:
"The official price of a dollar will get you less than 75 cents in reality. Why is it anything but selfish - stupidly selfish - to ignore this?"
Ermmmmm, because the official rate is the law and the unofficial rate is illegal . If your landlord was a drug addict and asked to be paid in cocaine would you oblige? Or say, OK half in cocaine half in cash ?
I love how everybody uses the drug comparison (someone on another thread used the Bangkok sex trade, even better). So to get very technical on this:
Dollars are not a prohibited commodity. They are at most a commodity on which the government is trying to force
its price, a price which
does not exist in the market. Even going by your logic, the only "illegal" thing is
the rate, not the commodity itself. In some cases, the government demands payment in dollars - not cocaine - even in this country.
So to stretch your analogy to it's limits, at the very most one could use the examples of some other commodity subsidized by the government and then severely restricted. For example, oil: with it's price set by gov't, empty shelves, quantity reduced to 1 or 2 per customer and with a 20-30% markup in chinos - tacitly accepted by the govt. If the payment terms include oil, would it be unreasonable to demand the price at which oil can actually be bought? (Without resorting to going into Disco thousands of times over - dollars don't even have that option)
Dollars are not drugs. Except that in this country, everyone - including in government, it would appear - gets high on them.