Ann Barnhardt (Paladine): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dFVFJ0iRRA My blog: http://www.staresattheworld.com/ My Twitter: http://twitter.com/Aurini Download in MP3 Format: http://www.clipconverter.cc/ Credits: I Feel You by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
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| Now this is going to be a follow-up to my last video on net neutrality and how the FCC regulating our freedom for us is no sort of victory for anybody except the ISPs. | |
| Now, a lot of the comments I got on that video were suggesting that I had some sort of undue faith in the free market or that this was somehow necessary to protect consumers. | |
| And all of this, I think it speaks to a terrible ignorance of how the free market actually operates, why it is that people advocate free market solutions rather than government expansions, and also misses the core issue of all of this, which really is morality. | |
| And to try and explain what I mean by that, there's a video posted by Anne Bardhart a couple of years ago. | |
| I'll link to it down below. | |
| And to describe this woman, if there is a single paladin left on the planet, it is her. | |
| She was discussing the current issues that we're having in financial markets and particularly targeting the gold bugs, the libertarians who want to return to a gold standard. | |
| Now, while I'm not the biggest fan of fractional reserve lending, she correctly points out that a gold standard is not going to correct all the problems we have in the current marketplace. | |
| We've had gold standards in the past, and when the governments wanted to behave immorally and wanted to start playing fast and loose with the way money works, back then instead of printing dollars, all they did was add less valuable metal to the coins. | |
| You know, minting coins that weren't 100% silver or gold. | |
| And the exact same thing happens. | |
| And in fact, that's happening right now. | |
| A lot of the gold out there is nothing but gold leaf around tungsten core. | |
| As she points out, all of this is about morality. | |
| All of this is about one plus one equals two, about not playing shell games with the way money works. | |
| And the exact same thing goes for excesses and abuses of the free market. | |
| Now, the free market has two big ways that it tends to go wrong. | |
| You know, monopolies and externalities. | |
| These are the things that get the most criticism. | |
| And correct criticism. | |
| You see, the thing about the free market is that you enter the free market with the assumption that everybody's trying to screw you. | |
| Every company wants to charge the most they can while providing the least that they can get away with. | |
| And one of the best ways to do that is to achieve a monopoly. | |
| Now, every business to a certain degree is a monopoly. | |
| For instance, if you go to a convenience store, they have a local monopoly. | |
| Nobody else can come into that convenience store and try and sell Gatorade at a lower price than them. | |
| They have a local monopoly there. | |
| You'd have to walk two blocks out of your way to go to a cheaper convenience store, and they're gambling that you won't. | |
| Now, the problem with monopoly run excessively, the sort of monopoly that upsets people that people complain about, is when one particular company captures the entire market and thus can charge whatever they want because there's no longer any competition keeping them in check. | |
| And yes, this is quite problematic, bad for the consumer, and bad for the society as a whole because it decreases any need for innovation and it just helps a bunch of fat cats get even fatter. | |
| The other big problem with the free market is externalities. | |
| Externalities are anything, any negatives, specifically negative externalities, anything that isn't accounted for in the balance books. | |
| And the typical example given is a company that pollutes a whole lot but doesn't have to pay for the pollution. | |
| You know, they take all of their toxic waste and just dump it in the river. | |
| And it's the people downstream that have to deal with it. | |
| So the company makes all the profit without paying for the cleanup. | |
| You know, both just absolutely terrible things. | |
| So what do we do about these? | |
| Well, the current solution is bring in government regulation. | |
| So we have antitrust laws to break up large corporations and say, no, you can't do that. | |
| You're limiting competition. | |
| We're going to chop you up and prevent you from doing that and find you money to ensure that the consumer is protected. | |
| The other solution is regulation for environmentalism, etc., to make sure there are no negative externalities. | |
| And don't these seem like great things on the surface? | |
| You know, anytime some fat cat, some wealthy multi-billionaire gets out of line and starts telling us, the consumer, what we have to buy, we're going to get the government to protect us. | |
| You know, and hey, I'm the first one to say it. | |
| The free market is full of people that just want your money. | |
| They want to charge as much as they can and provide as little as possible. | |
| That's just how the free market works. | |
| Everybody's out to get you. | |
| But what happens when we start asking the government to protect us from these people? | |
| Well, the first thing is that the government expands and the government gains power. | |
| All of a sudden, these regulatory bodies, the ones enforcing the antitrust laws or the ones enforcing environmental regulations, these expand. | |
| They gain power. | |
| And when they gain power, the billionaire CEOs notice it. | |
| See, the government is really just in the business of power. | |
| When you expand the government as much as we have now, we've gone from historically a 3% of GDP state to a 40% to 60% GDP state, based upon which numbers you want to look at. | |
| Suddenly, there's a lot of power being held by these government ministers. | |
| And so these very organizations that were supposed to protect you become the very organizations that the corporations now hire lobbyists to go address. | |
| In other words, all you've done is remove the problem by one level. | |
| And furthermore, you've put it at a level which is far less accountable than the free market. | |
| And so, now that might surprise some of you. | |
| Me arguing that the government, which we all vote for, is less accountable than a private company that can do whatever it wants. | |
| Well, that's because there's no accountability mechanism with the government, and there is with the private corporation. | |
| You see, private corporations ultimately have a bottom line. | |
| They need to respond to the market. | |
| And if their product is terrible enough, nobody is going to buy it. | |
| Private corporations have an incentive to trim the fat. | |
| The government, on the other hand, does not have any checks or balances ultimately. | |
| The votes are largely determined by demographics, by marketing, and you only have two choices anyway. | |
| For instance, if you live anywhere in the Midwest, both sides, both the Democrats and Republicans, are going to support the corn lobby because most of their demographic makes money off of the corn lobby. | |
| And outside of those states, nobody cares about that. | |
| So we have tons of government money being fueled in to growing corn that nobody wants. | |
| And a few farmers are making a profit. | |
| And it's completely messing with the price of food all over the world. | |
| It can be indirectly pointed to for a lot of the starvation that happens in different countries. | |
| It's certainly not good for your average American, and it's not even good for the average farmer. | |
| But some people are making a lot of money off of it, and it's not going anywhere. | |
| The same thing goes for all these regulatory agencies. | |
| You see, a corporation has a bottom line. | |
| A corporation can go out of business. | |
| You know, if we allowed them to, we don't, you know, now they're all too big to fail. | |
| But, you know, in theory, a company can go out of business. | |
| They need to trim the fat. | |
| A regulatory agency never does anything but get bigger. | |
| So the regulatory agency can get more and more rules that are harder and harder to interpret, giving all sorts of jobs for lawyers. | |
| And the companies start hiring more and more lobbyists to influence these laws. | |
| And what do you think happens? | |
| This is when you truly start getting monopolies and negative externalities. | |
| See, monopolies, historically speaking, monopolies almost never happen. | |
| What's far more common is a cartel, where a bunch of people in the same business all agree to set prices. | |
| Now, because these are a bunch of greedy businessmen, eventually somebody is tempted to break the cartel and sell at a lower price and out-compete the rest of them. | |
| Cartels are inherently unstable because there's no ideology holding them together. | |
| It's always tempting to break the cartel, and that's exactly what happens. | |
| Yes, you do occasionally have these cartels, and it's not good, but natural human greed breaks them up. | |
| The same thing goes for externalities, where people do not like externalities. | |
| They do not like coal dust all over their houses, and people complain. | |
| And in fact, there is a market for running a decent business, for running a business that is environmentally sound. | |
| You just need to sell it in the correct way. | |
| Whereas when you have the government regulating things and you have a whole bunch of people that are unaccountable to anybody, and it's all run by the lobbyists, then guess what? | |
| That's where you get monopolies. | |
| Whenever you find a monopoly in history, you find a whole bunch of regulatory agencies of the government backing it up. | |
| And the same thing goes for the externalities. | |
| You lobby the government to make sure that these things aren't externalities, that you can build completely toxic and destructive solar cells without ever having to pay the cleaning costs of your mining operation because you're environmental, even though you are strip mining the third world. | |
| Regulatory agencies, the government is nothing but power. | |
| See, corporations are power with money, and so they have limits set on them. | |
| Ultimately, corporations have to exist in the real world. | |
| And as bad as they are, as greedy and selfish as they are, they have to deal with reality. | |
| Governments, on the other hand, do not. | |
| Governments can spend profligately. | |
| They can do whatever they want until, of course, they bankrupt the entire nation and the foreign army invades and executes everybody and enslaves everybody else. | |
| Governments are not ultimately accountable. | |
| So, all you are doing when you regulate an industry, when you demand that the government come in and save you, you are just removing that power to somewhere even harder to access, even harder to hold accountable. | |
| You're making it more complex, more direct, harder to understand, and less accountable. | |
| And morality. | |
| Let's talk about the morality at the beginning of this. | |
| All of this has to do with individual morality. | |
| Quite frankly, you, when you beg the government to go defend your morality, you're not being a moral person, you're being a lazy person. | |
| You are no longer standing up for what's right and what should be done. | |
| You are begging somebody else to do it for you. | |
| You're begging somebody else to take care of you. | |
| If you don't like the way a corporation is run, if you think they have monopolistic practices, if you just don't like the way they treat their workers, then boycott them and buy an alternative product for more. | |
| I don't buy Apple products because I do not like the way that company is run. | |
| I do not like the infrastructure that they are creating in their computers or in the whole software environment. | |
| I dislike it, which is my opinion. | |
| And so, I will forego a good quality MP3 player, and they do have the best MP3 players on the planet, because I don't like them on principle. | |
| I'm not begging anybody else to do this. | |
| You know, if I will tell other people my opinion, I will spread this and hopefully I can get the company to change. | |
| If a company upsets me with their practices, I will write them and tell them why. | |
| I will tell other people. | |
| This is what the media is supposed to do, but of course, we don't want to take responsibility for ourselves. | |
| We want somebody else to do it. | |
| Daddy government will take care of us because we are too weak and childlike to take care of ourselves. | |
| Demanding that the government regulate businesses is no different than demanding that the government pay for your socialism or give you welfare because you can't keep a job or any of this. | |
| It is refusing to take responsibility for yourself. | |
| And when you refuse that responsibility, you hand the power over to somebody else. | |
| You want a parent. | |
| You want to be a perpetual child. | |
| And unlike the parents that we grew up with, the government has no innate love for any of us. | |
| These are a bunch of psychopaths purely seeking after power. | |
| And so with this net neutrality stuff, all we did was take away power from the evil corporations who ultimately have to make a buck and giving it to a bunch of bureaucrats that only have their best interests in mind. | |
| Now, if that doesn't convince you that this net neutrality thing is not what it's being made out to be, let's just go back to the facts quickly. | |
| Net neutrality was a term invented by the FCC about 15 years ago. | |
| The problems that it's supposed to address don't really exist. | |
| You can point to a few ISPs acting like jerks, but we already had a solution there. | |
| Google Wire was going to be coming in and undermining them and forcing them to treat their customers better. | |
| In other words, the free market was working. | |
| And third, this legislation is 332 pages long. | |
| It's been passed and they still haven't shown us what's in it. | |
| And you're telling me that these guys have our best interests at heart and that all of this is going to work out just swimmingly for us. | |
| It's not going to be websites requiring to register with the FCC and getting shut down if they have the wrong sort of content. | |
| No, this is just about making sure we can get access to Netflix without having to pay an extra 20 bucks a month. | |
| Right. | |
| Quite frankly, if you think you can pay somebody else to be moral for you, you're out to lunch. | |
| And that's exactly what this is. | |
| When you beg the government to do what you should be doing, you're paying somebody else to be moral. | |
| And you are the only person that can live with your own virtue. |