The Weebertarian

In this episode I go over episode 4 of Banished From the Hero's Party, discussing topics such as Public vs Private services, the misallocation of resources in public services, examples of how public services fail, particularly in American Healthcare, which is anything but a private, free market, capitalistic market, subjective value, and voluntary exchange. 

One of the earliest episodes of this show I made was explaining why I think the claim that employers exploit labor is unjustified, and I used Konosuba as a springboard for that conversation. Today I saw a meme that seemed to share the views I was attempting to express in that episode, but naturally as a meme I felt it didn't explain well enough, so I wrote up an explanation that I thought I'd share here to further elaborate, and better articulate, what I was trying to communicate in that episode.

Commentary on episode 3 of Banished From the Hero's Party, with examples for wages, entrepreneurship, regulation, and a brief discussion of Femininity.

Continuing with the commentary on the anime "Banished From the Hero's Party". This episode was the one that originally made me decide I wanted to comment on this show, specifically because of the economic fallacies within, but upon re-watching it also had a lot to offer in terms of military strategy and politics.

I saw this meme a couple weeks back, among the many memes about Anya punching Damian, and subsequently apologizing, which got me thinking a bit about bullying and public schools.

First episode of a series in which I hope to go through episodes of anime and comment on the economics, or politics of each episode from a libertarian perspective. In this episode I discuss episode 1 of "Banished From the Hero's Party, I Decided to Live a Quiet Life in the Countryside".

In yesterday's episode of Timcast IRL, he had James O'Keefe, Andy Ngo, and Libby Emmons on to discuss the state of journalism, and it was a very interesting conversation. In this episode, I wanted to reach the chapter from Murray Rothbard's "Anatomy of the State" titled "How the State Preserves Itself" because I felt it was particularly relevant to that conversation.

Timcast IRL Episode: https://youtu.be/gpseTewbaPY

How the State Preserves Itself: https://mises.org/library/anatomy-state/html/c/33?fbclid=IwAR1RQbMKVQvvOoRFTxP93CqvR2l4zzmabxLu_b7UJ2Dm3FalHUQDTrAjXpo

Anatomy of the State: https://mises.org/library/anatomy-state/html

For a New Liberty: https://mises.org/library/new-liberty-libertarian-manifesto

With the news of Microsoft acquiring (or offering to buy, I'm entirely clear on the deal) Activision/Blizzard, I thought I'd talk a little about the economics of corporate mergers and acquisitions. 

In this episode I'm reading from an article published in FEE.org by Peter G. Klein.

https://fee.org/articles/mergers-and-acquisitions-why-greed-is-good/

I've been watching a lot of debate and commentary on debates of Socialism vs Capitalism lately, and I wanted to talk about the issue of debaters getting hung up on their conflicting definitions of capitalism, and how capitalists can resolve the disagreement. 

Also, I saw a claim that the Ancap argument for "Slave Wages" is that "Somebody else will do it if I don't, so it might as well be me." That, in my opinion, is a very poor assessment of the Ancap position, or if not, then those saying it aren't properly articulating an accurate capitalist position on the issue of "Slave Wages".

I had a bit of a discussion with my friend as to whether Ubisoft might be buffing the newly released character in For Honor, Kyoshin, in order to raise sales, because if not enough people buy the character, it may have costed more to make him than they earned in sales. My friend insisted that's impossible, so I thought I'd take a look at the Income Statement for Ubisoft to is if that's true. 

In this episode I wanted to address the common belief that increased costs cause higher prices, which isn't entirely accurate, though it can, depending upon market forces, be the case. I also wanted to talk a little bit about public education, and the belief that we need to pay teachers more, which I may address further some other time.

In this episode I wanted to discuss the "Gamestonk" situation.

Specifically  I wanted to talk about "Short Selling" a stock, and the effects it  might have on the stock market as well as a business' finances, both  positive and negative, because I think that the general perception that  short selling is negative is incorrect.

That, however, is not to  say that I am opposed to what WallStreetBets did. I don't know enough  about the situation with the Gamestop stock, or what hedge funds were  attempting to do by shorting it. I'm merely commenting on short selling,  and its market effects, as I understand them.

Today, I saw a meme from the EPI (Economic Policy Institute) about  the minimum wage, which is so old, I recall having seen it back around  2012 or 2013. This was before I had ever learned anything about  economics, or ever considered myself a libertarian, and I remember, even  back then, thinking that this meme immediately struck me as incorrect.

I decided to examine that meme again, due to it circulated again.

I'd briefly mentioned in a previous episode how I think that the  American poor are kind of spoiled by the high living standards that we  have in the US, and don't really understand real poverty.

In this  episode I'll elaborate on that, along with the fact that the poorest 20%  of Americans have higher living standards than the poor in any other  OECD nation.

https://fee.org/articles/the-poorest-20-of-americans-are-richer-than-most-nations-of-europe/

In this episode I talk about how, in Albion Online, buying relics that  are priced lower than total value of the components received from  salvaging them, then selling those components back onto the market to  make a profit is good for the economy.

In this episode, I talk a bit about the "broken window fallacy" in  economics, and attempt to relate that to the anime, "Girls und Panzer"  and "Bodacious Space Pirates", as well as talk a bit about insurance.

In this episode, I first wanted to issue a correction on a previous episode, in which I said slaves could vote in the south, when it should have been that slaves counted toward representation in the south.

Next, I wanted to read and comment on this FEE article, by Robert P Murphy, about how "Extreme Poverty Rates Plummet Under Capitalism".

https://fee.org/articles/extreme-poverty-rates-plummet-under-capitalism/?fbclid=IwAR37H3Abm6Tdf4hfAeR38uMH1pxkupRpk607lMl9byJUugZqbvdtyEwIx8E

In a few episodes of Tim Pool's podcast, he's recently mentioned  how Trump saved New York by making the city more appealing to the  wealthy, thus expanding the tax base, and increased police funding,  which in turn reduced crime. While that may be part of the story, I have  a tendency to agree with economists who oppose the assumption  that greater taxation and police funding cause reduction in crimes.

In  my rant, I touch on several subjects that are somewhat related to  crime, such as the drug war and alcohol prohibition, and the 2014 study  commissioned by the Obama administration to study gun ownership's  relation to crime.

Note: I promise, I don't  have anything against Tim Pool. I quite like his show and listen to it  daily, which also means that he happens to be a major source of topics  for me to discuss, whether I agree or disagree.

I've been seeing a lot of people talking about how  the Republicans have done nothing to protect free speech on social media  platforms, and I wanted to address the inconsistent applications of  property rights from the left-wing, right-wing, and moderates, and my  frustration with the desire to get people back on to platforms which  don't respect your free speech rather than letting companies that do  fill that niche.

I talk a bit about pushes for free speech regulations on the internet, and although I might not articulate some of the best arguments for why this might be a bad thing, typically I think that regulations have a lot of unintended consequences that not only either make the problem worse, or create totally new unrelated problems, but that they also usually create barriers to entry within a market that might help to better establish currently existing monopolies.

In this episode I talk a bit about the market for private security as an alternative to police. I'm by no means an expert on the subject, and I do a terrible job explaining it in comparison to Bob Murphy, who I'd recommend you give a listen to. Here's an episode from his podcast about the market for private security and how it could replace police:

https://www.bobmurphyshow.com/episodes/ep-124-the-right-way-to-defund-the-police-and-an-eyewitness-account-of-the-capitol-hill-autonomous-zone-chaz/

The bit that I did hope to contribute to the conversation are my arguments against the claim that the poor would have little to no access to private security. 

In this episode, I talk a bit about some of the anime I watched during the spring 2020 season, now that it's concluded. These aren't "reviews" as I don't feel qualified to offer in depth anime reviews, but I do talk about what anime I enjoyed, or felt were a bit lacking, as well as interesting aspects of the anime Ascendance of a Bookworm, and the 8th Son, from a libertarian perspective.

In this episode, I wanted to discuss the strange position Tim Pool seems to take on Google's monopoly, and competition within the search engine market, as well as discuss the strange irony in tearing down statues, and their history.

I'd recently shared a video by Tim Pool on FaceBook about how people are refusing to work in order to continue receiving unemployment benefits, and my aunt asked "How the hell are we going to pay for this?" In this episode I explain Quantitative Easing, the effects of inflation, and end on how I think we got to this point: by the harmful economic parallel between Keynesianism and Socialism/Communism, a denial of Say's Law, frequent use of the Broken Window Fallacy, and a demand-side view of economics.

This is also my first "scripted" episode. Some of it was scripted and some not, because I'm thinking I might be better able to concisely articulate my ideas by scripting my episodes. 

I might go between scripting episodes and winging it depending upon how much time I have to write a script and the necessity of having one.