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Comment count is 24
Jeriko-1 - 2012-09-07

Didn't watch but have my stars.
That sneering face is enough to make me hulk out. I'm sure once the mouth opens it's all downhill from there.


Hooker - 2012-09-07

What about things that aren't fucking cellphones or oil and have significant barriers to entry? Oh, that wasn't covered? Shucks.

The parallels to the evolution "debate" are pretty striking with the free market debate. Both concepts are simple to understand and have a huge amount of descriptive and predictive power. Two main and relevant differences emerge, though:

1) Evolution doesn't have anything falsifying it, while the academic field of Economics is quick to point out the limitations of the invisible hand of the market.
2) The opponents of evolution deny it outright. The opponents of the invisible hand concept frequently (always?) don't deny the effectiveness of it on elastic, easily produced goods (food, clothes, cellphones, etc.). The problem is with essential services, inelastic goods, and natural monopolies, and libertarians constantly fall down trying to contort the idea to explain how the free market would sort those out.

In conclusion, fuck people like this.


Oscar Wildcat - 2012-09-07

It's tempting to write a little exegesis on Paretos Principle, and more generally power law distributions, and how it's _inevitable_ that monopolies form when a number of independent players are competing in a free market. But I'll just concur; Fuck this guy, up the bunghole, with a #2 lead pencil.


Riskbreaker - 2012-09-07

I'm happy to see my "meanwhile in bizarro world" tag coming alive.


fourthguy - 2012-09-07

It's a good tag, given the nature of a lot of stuff that turns up here. I'm surprised it hasn't caught on already.


Caminante Nocturno - 2012-09-07

Where do they find the weaselly little shits to star in these videos? Is there some spawning pool for them somewhere?


SteamPoweredKleenex - 2012-09-07

Libertarianism is one of those delusions that inspires not only a superiority complex, but an intense desire to display said superiority to the widest audience possible.


memedumpster - 2012-09-07

Some ride the short bus, some ride the Priebus.


Paracelsus - 2012-09-07

When I saw the preload, I thought, this guy has the perfect face for someone who reports to Darth Vader.


SteamPoweredKleenex - 2012-09-07

I thought that Gilbert Gottfried had reproduced.


OxygenThief - 2012-09-07

I thought that god is dead.


Chocolate Jesus - 2012-09-07

All of these supply-side/free market assholes have the same pinched evil face, it's the result of a lifetime of smug scowls and contempt for common men.


Riskbreaker - 2012-09-07

These poor fools probably never even had a lemonade stand as kids, and somehow they think they have all figured out regarding economics.


Spoonybard - 2012-09-07

Monopolists don't have to quintuple their prices to reduce consumer surplus and create deadweight loss in the market system.

Although he ignores other barriers to entry, like economies of scale, this guy is right about the government entrenching some monopolies through legal means. Somehow he fails to take that observation to its natural conclusion. The monopolists themselves lobby for those barriers in order to retain their market share. This is an example of capitalists corrupting democracy, not the other way around.


SteamPoweredKleenex - 2012-09-07

Sadly, their "solution" is to remove government altogether, though I've yet to hear anything resembling a coherent argument as to how "natural," "free market," or "invisible hand"-type forces would stop the same behavior, if not worse.

At best, they might say something about how nobody will purchase things or do business with a corrupt entity, even if they're the only source of a needed product/service.


Toenails - 2012-09-07

His voice was exactly how I thought it would sound.


John Holmes Motherfucker - 2012-09-07

I watched about a minute and a half. 5 stars for excessive pastiness.

There was a time when libertarians didn't suck, but now they're fashionable. These guys always think they're being supremely rational and embodying "reason", but they're actually allowing themselves to be seduced by the incredibly attractive idea that everything would work if we only did nothing. There's never actually been a perfect libertarian society, so it's really all pie-in-the-sky, impossible to disprove and easy to rationalize. You can't disprove an ideal situation because it never happens in the real world. Talk about how Ayn Rand influenced Alan Greenspan, and how that didn't work out so great in the long run, and they'll tell you some bullshit about the gold standard or something else to prove that it's not a real test. It wasn't thirty years of deregulation that made Wall Street toxic to the economy; it's the fact that deregulation wasn't absolute.

This guy is not being rational at all. In the part that I watched, he wasn't really being honest. Price fixing is not "deciding to pay what everybody else is paying." There's a little more to it. And I love how he made it seem insane that the meaning of "monopoly" has shifted since 1300.

He's an evangelist, and he's peddling a religion.


John Holmes Motherfucker - 2012-09-07

Correction:

Price fixing is not "deciding to charge what everybody else is charging."


Syd Midnight - 2012-09-09

There's never been a failed libertarian society because if a society fails then it obviously wasn't libertarian enough, so it doesn't count. That's objective logical truth, not a logical fallacy like religion.


gravelstudios - 2012-09-07

This statement is intended in a completely non-political way.

This guy looks like the love child of James Carville and Condoleezza Rice.


dead_cat - 2012-09-07

This guy looks like a giant cranky baby with hormonal issues and an eating disorder.


Miss Henson's 6th grade class - 2012-09-08

No, he looks like the "Abe" character in the fishtank in "Hellboy"


That guy - 2012-09-08

If I'm going to listen to a libertarian for 10 minutes, he'd better have a better voice and less punchable face than this guy. I made it 9 seconds.


Maru - 2012-09-09

A lot of times these libertarian guys use some kind of abstruse economic theory to bolster their nonsense, but this video is great because I don't have to do any research at all to rebuke everything he's saying.


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