This Libertarian Film and Economics Channel Doesn't Know Anything About Film (or Economics) 

- Benjamin Franklin

I've been struck by this exact observation many times. And every time I'm reminded of it it's a maddenly frustrating experience. It's very disheartening to me when authentic communication with another person becomes impossible.

Not just their livelihood, these days it's their fragile worldview.

I think the same can be said of anyone from any demographic, especially those who believe in false dichotomies

And you’ll never get someone to admit they’re wrong when their sense of righteousness depends on their misinformed stance.🤡

Or basically any modern war

Conveniently ignoring the period of time when *people* were trade and commerce. Unless he thinks the Atlantic slave trade wasn't violent somehow

@@davidtaylor142or a lot of ancient ones too

Trade agreements can have devastating effects for local populations, causing their markets to go into crisis, people to migrate away seeking a living, increased organized crime, political upheaval... it's not precisely like shooting someone in the face, but it takes a deliberate lack of imagination to not call that "violence."

explain all trade, sean

I'm not a bitter guy who can't sell a script ..It's the collective lefties that keep my talent being recognized !

Yeah because so much policy is libertarian like, like, wait there had to be something... Federal reserve system? Note.. Endless wars? The massive Ponzi scheme you call a retirement plan? His sanity billions of disgusts l dollars of corporate bailouts? COVID lockdowns? Nope. But keep telling yourself that libertarians are powerful.

*cough* a specific mustache man *cough* art school *cough*

@@JordanJumpindamn 😂

Ben Shapiro even had an inside connection! His father worked in the industry. When nepotism doesn't get you in the door of the industry with THE MOST NEPOTISM then you know you can't write for shit. I mean, were taking absolute garbage if your dad's friends in the biz can't even punch your scripts up. Hollywood is known for turning dog water into Aquafina. If they can't find a single way to rework your script into something at least decent...well, we see what the outcome is. Now we all have to suffer Ben acting a fool until his final day.

just like their boy A.Hitty

@@ChristopherSadlowski "An inside connection" is underselling it, and his father's the least important part of it. His father is a composer who worked in Hollywood, while his mother was a TV Executive. You might also know his cousin, Mara Wilson, who played Matilda. He spent the entirety of his life in LA, being born there and studying political science at UCLA before finally leaving to go to Harvard. He had every door open for him when it came to get a job in Hollywood, but nobody wanted to buy his scripts.

Dem freaking Commies ruin everything! 💩

No backup generator, no backup control system, no physical containment to mitigate or channel the potential explosive forces.

holy f, not a good first go-to! I'd say drugs if I was being an honest libertarian! But sleeping in public comes to mind. Or allowing people to build homes less that some gigantic size that costs a million to build! that pisses me off. Idk if war is technically a libertarian issue, but I'd say anti-war could be the go-to.

Does he know?

Lol this is hysterical. People like him think they’re so forward-thinking and independent while they disrespect the things other people constantly do to make their lives possible, exactly the thing they accuse everyone else of.

I went to a really underfunded public elementary school whose primary student population were children of migrant workers and military families. I wouldn't trade that experience for the world. Why would someone resent public school so much? I really don't understand these people.

was it unaffordable due to cost of regulation, tax, and elevated cost of mortgage due to tax, regulation, the state owning half the land West of the Mississippi, elevating the cost of land, rent, mortgage, housing? How much govt interference in the housing market in NYC? The idea there were no expenses beyond normal market conditions is absurd. Their inability to expand the containment was largely due to less profit than the market would provide per catch, if not for the state ripple effects from every direction distorting and deforming the otherwise free, lucrative, market. Oh, and they have corporate tort liability limits by being in business and having an LLC or incorporation...and that incentivizes harm too. It's crony captialism...as is IP (patents, etc. they might have). All encourages harm to consumers and others. All are state creations entirely.

“The government did exactly what it was supposed to do and made the situation infinitely worse” is not the epic takedown you think it is lol

I think part of the issue is that Venkman completely failed to cooperate or explain anything. He saw a guy was from the EPA, and rather than think "Oh, yeah, we are running a nuclear power plant in our garage, that guy should probably know we're competent" he told the guy to fuck off repeatedly, hoping he'd go away. Egon tried to explain the issue, but it was way too little, too late there. Venkman was more interested in dunking on a guy who is kind of annoying than actually being responsible or diligent with the thing that would've exploded the entire city.

... Did... Did he really call it No Vans land?? I get naming stuff is hard but did he really stick with the first idea that popped into his head?

The level of grift you need to reach to be able to sell the same concept 3 separate times is kinda impressive.

would that be a bad thing? aren't those the exact formative years when we do form our lifelong values and interpretations based on what we read?

Benny was too much of a hedonist to be into that kinda nerd shit. A 14 year old whose reading Atlas Shrugged is guaranteed maidenless

Hey, he could have been one of those Andrew Tate types.

​@@007kingifritBasing your ideology on something you red when you were 14 years old is definitely unwise... if that thing was Atlas Shrugged that makes it exponentionally worse.

@@Jaymaxair you show that you know nothing about humans, nearly everyone does this, that's why we call it your formative years that's about when you read karl marx huh? and what's wrong with atlas shrugged?

I have a cultural theory that the reason the US deifies the founding fathers so much is because we're too young as a country to have organically developed myths and legends. We need a unifying example of national character, so we treat the founding fathers kind of like little-g gods. That prevents us from seeing the cultural context behind what they said that you're pointing out here. Thanks for the watch! :)

@@themorbidzooRight on the money. Search for American Civil Religion if you haven't already.

Here’s a fun Franklin quote most people haven’t heard 😉 “All the property that is necessary to a man for the conservation of the individual and his propagation of the species is his natural right, which none can justly deprive him of; but all property superfluous to such purposes is the property of the public, who by their laws have created it, and who may therefore by other laws dispose of it, whenever the welfare of the public shall demand such disposition.”

​@@themorbidzooI'm late to this, but I think the US does have organically developed myths and legends... they're just mostly from black communities

Ugh, preach

Do you suppose it's part of the Cold War capitalism vs communism dynamic? I notice there's this false dichotomy where people think it's all one or the other, so you can't criticize either without getting lumped in with some pretty extreme ideology.

@@eyesofthecervino3366 I suppose so but only in so far as our focus is on teaching capitalism and capitalism only. Which is not to say that people aren't aware of the existence of other socio-economic systems, since they clearly of know the word 'communism' if nothing more than as an epithet, but that they were taught the other systems were "just bad" without any honest, coherent, academic analysis of them beyond their alleged inferiority. And when you couple that with only referring to capitalistic ideals in high school and undergraduate course work in economics, it's easy to see how this could give ignorant and incurious people the impression that Economics/markets=capitalism and vice versa.

@@n0tthemessiah Your last comment hits the nail on the head, I think. We have something of a religious worldview about capitalism, just like how people who grow up in evangelical Christianity (as I did) come to see all of human behavior as explained by the frame of "original sin." It's hard to put that frame down once and for all, even once you've woken up to the fact it was hoodwinking you. The whole society insists on capitalism as the economic frame, and we can't even put food on the table for our kids without buying into it on some level.

the concept of cross community trade likely pre-dates organized agriculture because it turns out that the concept of going from a place to another place with a bag full of stuff that you think or know the other place doesn't have and exchanging it for something else doesn't exactly ask for many prerequisites

I'm gonna ride the high of this comment for at least a week. Thanks so much for the kind words and for watching! ❤

@@themorbidzoo Thanks for the nice reply. If you're interested in how a new viewer came to your channel - then it was from your commentary on The Thing. The link was due to seeing an Adam Savage video about his prop replica from the film - the spider head thing. However, that isn't a film I've seen, (nor most of the others in your listing if I'm honest). That doesn't matter though because it's the essay and the delivery that make them interesting and entertaining. You said that these essays would get a very limited reading in academic circles, and it's great that you're bringing the practice to a wider audience. I look forward to seeing more.

@@petrosz1957 ah thanks-- that is good to know, I'm glad the algorithm is steering it toward that kind of audience in particular. Thanks for sticking around!!

Unsure why this was randomly proffered to me now but anyway, ditto original posting.

Omg you're the best. Thanks! Working on another pretty longform one now

@@themorbidzoo awesome! I'm looking forward to it 😊

Lol, love this 😄

Also, the church began collecting taxes and created internal conflict. You could say it failed, or that religion destroyed another otherwise peaceful society.

sooooo it lasted 400 years?

The dark ages lasted 400 years too. Everything back then lasted a long time because most people were too miserable or dead to even begin to think about changing things.

@@borneoorangutan apples to oranges, that's not a civilization, it's an "age" any civilization lasting 400 years is doing pretty good

Gaah thank you! That quote is beautiful 😭

Lol exaaaaactly. Dunning-Kruger bby

@@themorbidzoo looking forward to forcing my friends to view your block buster magnum opus Edward Cullen video, I know that will be an hour of IMMACULATE arguments

@@jojomojo712 Haha oh god you wouldn't dare

@@themorbidzoo i made several watch the prawn one, I have to lure them in with the Thing video first but I’ll get them to do it.

@@jojomojo712 Lol you're the best

Please fact check yourself

I have to say... I'm baffled that hardly anyone online even mentions Lieber having that weird association with libertarian hacks. It's just... there, I guess?

And the irony is that its whole premise really does not exist.

It's also a comedy, it's supposed to be funny that they kind of know what they're doing and that the EPA is in the wrong. It's supposed to be funny that they discover ghosts are real and Venkman's first thought is how they're going to make a fortune from franchising. I don't think the libertarian stuff was supposed to be serious

@@RogueAstro85yeah it seems like the MOST surface reading level is: AGHHHHH!!!!! GHOSTS! DEMONS! GODS FROM ANOTHER WORLD!!!! OH GOD! better call those guys in jumpsuits 😏 they got a 1-800 number 😏

I feel like the entire point of the IDW comic series, especially the Ghost Smashers arc, was turning around and pissing all over the first movie's libertarian message. Walter Peck gets put in charge of a new government agency regulating companies that deal with the paranormal and while he and the Ghostbusters still don't get along, he's portrayed way more sympathetically. Instead of a smarmy, bureaucratic obstructionist he's become a hard-nosed disciplinarian who recognizes the value of the service the Ghostbusters provide and is determined to make damn sure they provide it properly, with minimal collateral damage.

If I remember correctly the government was pretty reasonable in being suspicious of the Ghostbusters. Their efforts to shut down the business were comical and exaggerated but rooted in not believing in ghosts. Making the discovery that ghosts are real and turning that into a business to have the monopoly on dealing with the consequences is also not beneficial to society by any stretch so even there the message isn't completely on board with libertarianism. It has been a while since I watched it so all my points may be wrong, this is just from the bits and pieces I think happened in the movie.

How very dare you give me traffic >:I

Thank you!! My thought is that these people's ideas are bad enough on their own, they really don't need any hyperbole

Lol all economists are dirty collectivists except Austrians

Ha thanks, someday I hope someone will call me overrated, then I’ll know I’ve made it 😁

You are such a dear. Like a youtube muse. Now I have to know, what did you do in college specifically?

@@themorbidzoo unfortunately i am in covid college right now... but horror movies are my way out of feeling that slow creeping crawl of dread, the bomb above our heads of ecological collapse and the knowledge that anything that I do right now will do nothing to halt that encroaching judgement day... which is why I like your channel! Oh right my college. I am studying how political dissemination and radicalization occurs through the internet. And a lot of that involves the impact of channels like FEE, Steven Crowder and even PewDiePie on a person's ideology and where those changes take them. Which means it is just so cathartic to watch people just dunk on them for 44 minutes straight. The topic is so esoteric that I never get the opportunity to like just vent about how much I hate the channels without academic language so this type of video is my muse!!

@@shmuelhoit7118 Oh man, we're like the same person. I too have sunk so far into my dread that all I can do is try to laugh at the circus, and I too study internet ideology! Now is the time to discuss it, it's the forst time in history that the majority of people are able to communicate with thousands outside their immediate area, and we 1000% have not considered the consequences of that yet. At least it's good for content mining on my end, I'm going to talk about these things more, for sure. I'm really glad you're here for it!

@@themorbidzoo yea so now you probably get why when you were like "hey its politics time I'm talking about politics outside of attack on titan now and there will be no survivors" this became my favorite channel

If you're "dunking" on libertarians, I imagine you take a lot of Ls.

Okay so like i agree fully but also *why is nobody else talking about this* That monologue was phenomenal, and theres *no* reference to it in the comments wtf!?

True, it's a very good ideal for studying economics! But by itself, historical materialism doesn't mean much besides being a methodological approach-- society is the result of conditions, not ideals. A proper Austrian would say the exact same thing. Sean is a rube who doesn't know what he's talking about, but I guarantee you he wouldn't disagree with that statement either. The counterpoint from an Austrian perspective would be "the conditions of the modern worker are being artificially constrained by government intervention," which is just as unfalsifiable as "the conditions of the modern worker are artificially constrained by capitalism." I happen to suspect that the conditions of the worker are absolutely constrained by capitalism, but unless I can incontrovertibly prove why, my personal beliefs are really not very actionable, and *certainly* not relevant to economics as a field. This is the root of all the circular arguments between communists and capitalists.

@@themorbidzoo very VERY late response but, I agree with the thesis of what you say, yeah. For what is worth, I consider myself a socialist and my perspective is very much informed in Marxism, but I 100% agree that Marxism, or in this case specifically historical materialism, is a method of analysis, and I think that once communists start to treat it like a natural science then they have lost the plot entirely, within Marxism itself even. I am willing to admit that I'm far more partial to a Marxist perspective because I personally have a bias towards the working class (my class, go figure). To the dismay of economists around the world that are bitter about the fact that they can't turn economics into a hard science like physics, economics is a social science, there's perspectives, methods and frameworks that help us make sense of the impossibly complex dynamics society but at some point biases need to take place. Admittedly, I'm not very familiar with Austrian economics, but there are other stuff from Marxism to like, less in the area of economics and more in the area of sociology, like the conflict theory or idea of the structure and super structure I don't know if I agree with your conclusion, however. That our believes are not really very actionable, at least not in this case, because as you said, is unfalsifiable, we have hit and axiom I think. To prove incontrovertibly if the material conditions of the working class are constrained by capitalism or not is another question in disguise I think: what type of economic system we ought to build, one for the businesses and those who own them (in which case, is already built and the question is do we keep it?) or one for the working class? I'm not convinced we can build one where both interests can be upheld at the same time long term globally, we of course won't be able to find that answer as an absolute fact like we wold if it were a matter of smashing subatomic particles together, none the less, we need to build a society

@@themorbidzoo Also A Very Late Response, but the alligence to falsifiability, that most modern economic thought is based in, as a means to seperate the valid and the invalid or as you say the actionable and the inactionable isn't justifiable. Falsifiabilty conceptually is a means to an end, it's a way of papering over the deeper ideological inconsistencies of Capitalism without having to take a step back and really come to terms with the greater idealistic and material implications of economics as a disciple. Falsifiability allows for a moment to moment pragmatic decision making as generalized economic hueristics fail to account for observed behavior, but is by definition unable to see the forest for the trees. It is unable to as Kuhn put shift the paradigm. To give an example supply and demand as a heuristic works generally but breaks down often when examing a commodity that is required to maintain life if not direct as in the curves no longer match, but practically as food prices become untenably expensive. Falsifiabilty helps with this by providing a frame to build up and around these issues, but falsifiability will never give you the indication that supply and demand applied to commodity is just not a very good heuristic. This inability to creatively its way out of the paper bag is I think serverly overlooked, as bucking falsifiability is akin to bucking the scientific method in economic circles, as far as I am aware ( like Sean I'm not a classically trained economist, just a lowely critical theorist :). I think the parallels that you are drawing in the video and comment between Austrian school and marxist/ Frankfurt school as being unfalsifiable therefore inactionable is jumping the gun so to speak. This dichotomy you are drawing is one based in the idea that Austrian school is on the same ideological scope is reductive even if on the surface they seem equitable, as it equates a specific subset of applicable economic ideals applicable within an economic framework with a school of thought that offers an alternative to the power dynamics and forces present in the former. At some point your pragmatism is going to run up against a systematic problem of having to be based on unfalsifiable ideals that you will be forced to swallow as axiomatic, unless you're a post-structuralist....maybe...probably not. I'll stop here as a youtube comment isn't this serious and should stop taking it as such. P.S. I Just found your channel and I really enjoy it, sorry to leave a sorta schizo comment that is critical on a two year old video, but this point about falsifiability is just one of my bugbears from undergrad that I get irrationally heated about.

​@@themorbidzooThis is such an eloquent and intelligent breakdown of the argument from all sides, I feel it should be framed somewhere instead of just hanging around in a comment.

We here at The Morbid Zoo consider all monstrosities both real and imagined to be equally cheese. Thanks for watching 😁

Thanks so much 😊 I just need to upload more, I think

Same with me. In truth I wouldn’t even ascribe myself a label. I guess my position is just “whatever leads to the best material outcomes for the most amount of people” which seems to be somewhere around social democracy.

Thank you!! Ha, it's gotten to a point where I'll be picking music and think "this is nice" and then "no wait, too lo-fi." There aren't that many video essay cliches but boy is that one of them and boy does Sean love it

@@themorbidzoo I just imagine them sitting in a room full of Kubrick posters, wearing a sleeveless tank top and listening to a poorly mixed dubstep cover of Louis Armstrong they're going to use for the video and saying to themselves "this will totally get me laid".

@@griffin09 😂

Libertarians should drop their iPhones first and never get them fixed cause they aren’t smart enough to be on the internet

Ugh I was gonna have fun with this but remembering the Austrian school really dulls the enthusiasm

Lmfao

the second worst thing to come out of austria

Why?

Yup, they suck

There are a lot of these. Capitalists spend a lot of money on people who tell workers life will be better for workers if capitalists are allowed to do whatever they want.

Caught me I’m a terrible drinker 😔

@@themorbidzoo thats ok its just like any other skill, the secret is just dont give up 😁

It’s not but my deepest creative wish is to write for them so in the interest of manifestation I’ll say yes ha

Thank you 😊

💯

Man, I know he says that, but I feel like when you win the Nobel prize in Econ you’re an economist whether you like it or not lol

🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🫡