Yeah…it’s kind of funny how he literally mentions the “feedback loop” between customers and business twice in the 5 minute speech…yet insists (also more than once) that it is the customers that create the jobs.
Right. And this asshole has figured the way to get the best of both worlds…being rich while vilifying the rich. Notice the standing ovation he gets at the end of his anti-capitalism, pro-“tax the rich” speech. Same reason leftists love Buffett. And Michael Moore. It doesn’t matter who you are (as in, you can be exactly the kind of person that they are against), and as long as you stand beside them and vilify rich people (like yourself), you’re their hero.
In fact, you’re even more of a hero because you’re like a white man denouncing racism against blacks, or a man arguing for higher wages for women.
Yeah when he said that the first thought in my mind was “why does he need to buy anything? Why can’t he just give the money directly to the people without jobs? Wouldn’t that cut out a lot middle men?” His entire premise is “I can’t buy enough stuff to warrant more businesses hiring more of you unemployed people to make more products and thus get you a paycheck.” Well hell. A) why does he need to buy anything…he could hire these people himself…to work at one of his businesses, or to count grains of sand on the beach. B) why do these people have to “work” at all? If there isn’t a real market demand for whatever they would be “hired” to do, why doesn’t he just save them (and himself) the time and just give them the money?
That’s one way to look at it. I was thinking more along the lines of Keynesian aggregate demand. We need more demand to make the economy grow. He even says “only consumers can set in motion this virtuous cycle of increasing demand and hiring.”
My question to him is…where does the demand come from? In economics the term “demand” implies a means to acquire the good. This generally means money. “Demand” without a means to acquire is just “desire” or “want”. It doesn’t count. So this guy claims “demand” is what essentially drives economic growth…but what he really means is “human wants” are what drive growth. But earlier in the talk, he actually admits that “if there was no one around who could afford to buy what we had to sell, all those companies and all those jobs would have evaporated.”
ORLY! Ya don’t (JB) Say!
What kills me is that someone could be (apparently) so good at working within the market process, and create so much wealth, and yet have such a distorted (and ultimately opposite) understanding of how it all happened.
P.S.
I was wondering why this video was posted on an SPA and couldn’t seem to be found in the official TED channels…apparently there’s a reason…
