The Zeitgeist movement in general - and this movie in particular - is utter nonsense. Don’t waste your time. It’s a dead end.
hahahahaahaha; around the 10th minute mark. Aaaaawesome. :')
Mentally deranged is not the word. I think it is…a fad or a lifestyle?
(OK, I know what outsiders to this forum are thinking - that this is ironic. But interest in free markets often does not start out as a fad, so much as an ordinary desire to understand mundane things of life, which is the same desire that makes you want to know about nitrogen fixing and or yellow-coloured moons for example. But yes, it can reach a fad, lifestyle element.)
Look at the woman who runs Huffington Post. She is the wife of a billionaire. Her husband indulged her with a business. Which was a newspaper that complains about class warfare and elites. Ironically, this very newspaper earns $120 million a year, and contributes to the very fattening of a rich heiress’ purse that it otherwise complains about in its pieces. HuffHuffHuffHuffPo (sound of male harem bought with that money) is not about actually solving poverty or inequality. It’s just about complaining about it, like a fad and a lifestyle.
Cenk Uygur might complain about Corporate America, but he is a WHARTON graduate. Plenty of his own friends would have become Wall Street bankers and traders. Should we believe he is divorced from that friend circle now? All this Young Turks business? It’s just business. A successful one, yes.
Cenk Uygur, Arianna Huffianapolous (OK, I don’t know her name), and Peter Joseph are nowhere near “mentally deranged”; they are perfectly sane people who know exactly what they are doing.
That doesn’t mean he’s talking nonsense. He has no idea of economics. None what so ever. He denounces economics, period.
He thinks economic problems are technological problems and not value imputation problems. That’s the fundamental problem.
Peter has attended art school. Sorry, too typical.
You don’t have to be “mentally deranged” to talk nonsense. Let’s admit it - a deeply intelligent man like Keynes ended up writing Economic Possibilities For Our Grandchildren, a man twice as smart as me like Paul Krugman talks about space travel and space economics, and a scientist like Steve Weinberg sounds goofy when talking of non-physics subjects and so on.
And yeah, progressives like Joseph often follow from the famous Noam Chomsky line: “Economics was developed as a weapon of class warfare.” Which is quite bananas as anything.
I would call it a sign of narrow-mindedness, but then again I see economists irresponsibily throwing around opinions on climate change on public platform as if they were ever qualified to refute or prove anthropogenic global warming in the first place. An irresponsible linguist is only as bad as an irresponsible economist.
Doing nothing…what?lol
I don’t understand, if they want they’re wealth redistributed, why don’t they do it themselves?
I go to art school too, it’s best to avoid topics like economics and capitalism in that enviromment. lol
I know Stefan might be wasting his time with the rest of the movement, but I think he should at least make one, clear, straightforward exposition of the the calculation problems the Zietgiesters would run into, and the problems with claiming it will be a “voluntary” system while at the same time taking over the whole globe. If he walks away now they’re just going to think they vanquished another capitalist croney.
The problem, as I said in the other thread, was that Stefan was talking to a friendly audience. So when he says something simple like “you can’t calculate without prices”, we know what he’s talking about. However people who are ignorant of Austrian economics, and indeed economics in general, can easily fall prey to the “Oh he’s just a mind-locked fool!” nonsense. Likewise when he says that it’s “just Marxism with robots”, those in the know will see that he’s saying that it suffers from the same fundamental problems as traditional Communism, while the uninformed will think “oh he’s just calling anything he doesn’t like Marxism”.
I think one more, good faith attempt should be made.
Sources for the Zeitgeist rebuttal (Feb 2nd)
https://forum.freecapitalists.org/t/louboutin-replica-space-at-the-top-of-vogue-tight-on-price/23581
" but I think he should at least make one, clear, straightforward exposition of the the calculation problems the Zietgiesters would run into, and the problems with claiming it will be a “voluntary” system while at the same time taking over the whole globe"
They’re free to do whatever they want, although “voluntary” is clearly not his intention. I’m not sure where he says “voluntary”.
I’ve seen some interviews that had nothing to do with zeitgeist but with his personal life. He starts off with complaining about something, then talks about his music life and starts playing the xylophone(ding,ding ding tralalaal), then complains again. From what I’ve seen, I’m not sure a guy like that believes in “voluntary” association, especially when it concerns his project.
You think that’s the problem with resource economics? Clearly they would run into a calculation problem, but the idea becomes absurd long before you get into that. A much more elementary problem with their theory is that they think that getting rid of capitalism magically creates super-abundance. That’s the problem with their theory.
They have no interest in learning. Study what they have to say, point out their flaws, and then be proclaimed “conditioned by money” as a result. Polylogism. Absolute quackery. I think too many attempts in good faith have been made. These people want to deny reality.
What’s preventing them from making their magic machines? No reasonable answer on their part.
How is it that money creates scarcity, but when we print infinite amounts of it, we still have scarcity? No reasonable answer on their part.
Why do moneyless communes become or stay primitive? No reasonable answer on their part.
I used to be a “social credit theory” kind of guy, and I bought into the hype from TVP. People who want to learn will learn. Those who don’t will stay right there.
I say, instead of combatting them, encourage them. They won’t get anywhere, anyways.
Yes. After exposing the logical flaws and circular arguments again and again, they don’t see their error in reasoning. This is why I consider plenty of them to be just plain crazy.
Why do moneyless communes become or stay primitive? No reasonable answer on their part
The primitive part doesn’t really matter to them since they hate technology. They think it’s better to stay primitive.
- You think that’s the problem with resource economics? Clearly they would run into a calculation problem, but the idea becomes absurd long before you get into that. A much more elementary problem with their theory is that they think that getting rid of capitalism magically creates super-abundance. That’s the problem with their theory.
Well yeah, the question of how we get from point A (today) to point B (automated utopia) kills the idea entirely. But of course it’s because the capitalists are keeping us down/we’re brainwashed/We haven’t tried hard enough, etc. They still think “well maybe if we could get past the start, then we’d be good!” But of course that’s not the case.
An interesting point to make would be that we actually ARE in a “resource-based economy”. But instead of having centralized computer and database to do all our calculating, we use the decentralized price system and indvidual actors. It’s all still based on how many resources we have available to us to meet our ends. Of course that is all confounded by state intervention. They think the problem is money, but they don’t understand what money IS, and what it would be in an unfettered market. This is partially obsfuscated by the current realities of fiat currency and fractional reserve banking. They associate the ills caused by current policy with the money, rather than the State.
I forgot to add, I think it’s important to respond thoroughly, publicly, and in a simple manner to movement like this. While you might not crack the hardcore followers, you have a much better chance of reaching the people who are on the fence about it, or those who might be receptive to the ideas.
I mean, look how far Marxism got, despite the fact that economists knew it would fail and likely cause massive amounts of violence.
Yeah, I’d say how we’re going to get there is a concern. But never mind that. The thing is that they never really specify how it’s going to come about. When they are talking about their system, they are always assuming post-scarcity to already be there. It’s post-scarcity because they define it to be.
Right, the cultural Marxism. Everybody just doesn’t get it because they’re blinded by “the system”.
An economy is a system to allocate scarce resources. All economies are “resource-based”, because in every economy, even a Stalinist one, the ultimate limitation for production is availability of resources.
I don’t think I could watch the whole video to even respond.
I could only watch the first two minutes. He was already taking what Stefan said out of context. What’s the point in finishing?
5th.
Just posted by Stef: