Jimmy Carr’s Short Funny Wise Lecture on Communism

Jimmy Carr: Communism make perfect sense in our own families, but it doesn't scale up:

Jimmy: "I don't know, you might object to capitalism. And Ticketmaster a very good example of the capitalist market. And capitalism is a terrible system, apart from all the fucking others. A bunch of young people seem to have fallen in love with communism. the fuck is going-. Communism is a great idea. Wrong species! Think about capitalism. It kind of leans into what we are. We're quite self interested. It works."

"What's your name? [Audience member]: "Sam... Define communism for me. Define communism."

Jimmy: "From each according to their abilities to each according to their needs. Yeah, It just doesn't scale. Everyone is a communist. All of you are communists. With your family. If you've got kids, you're a fucking communist at home, each according to their needs. You take care of them. Of course you do. And as things get wide in your local community, you might be a socialist, try and help everyone out. And then you get up to nation state level, and you go, "Yeah, fuck those guys."

There's always going to be an in-group preference. I'm sorry, but you're human beings. Unlucky. The problem with American communism, which is, you know, woke, is better described as American Marxism. And what it is is, instead of trying to redistribute wealth, which is a perfectly reasonable thing to want to do, they want to redistribute status, and that is a recipe for fucking madness."

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Thomas Sowell Quotes

Excellent collection of quotes by economist Thomas Sowell:

Here are a few of my favorites:

"Intellect is not wisdom”

“When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear.”

"The truth is often not complicated. What gets complex is evading the truth.”

"The problem is that Johnny doesn't know what thinking is. He confuses it with feeling”

“The great escape of our times is escape from personal responsibility for the consequences of one’s own behavior.”

“When people get used to preferential treatment, equal treatment seems like discrimination.”

"There's now a world in which the success of others is a grievance, rather than an example"

“Since this is an era of 'fairness' & 'social justice... what is your 'fair share' of what someone else has worked for?”

"One of the most important reasons for studying history is that virtually every stupid idea that is in vogue today has been tried before and proved disastrous before, time and again.” 

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Milton Friedman Points to the Lack of Viable Alternatives to Capitalism

Milton Friedman schools Phil Donahue on the lack of alternatives to capitalism:

The full interview:

This interview occurred in 1979, when people often sat down to talk with people even when they had disagreements.

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Some Hope for Insulin Users, Courtesy of the Revived U.S. Antitrust Division

Excerpt from Matt Stoller's website:

[O]n Thursday, the FTC voted to resurrect the Robinson-Patman Act, a bill prohibiting corporate bribery and price discrimination by middlemen that hasn’t been meaningfully enforced since the 1970s. I wrote several chapters in my book on the titanic fight in the 1930s to tame chain stores with this law, and the equally vicious conflict in the 1970s to stop enforcing it. The end of RPA enforcement is why chain stores like Walmart and Amazon took over our retail space, and why dominant middlemen control every area of our economy at this point. It’s worth noting that Robert Bork’s most hated statute was the Robinson-Patman Act, and he considered it a tremendous victory that he helped end the enforcement of the law.

So what happened at the FTC? All five commissioners voted on a policy statement saying that the use of rebates by dominant middlemen in the insulin market were a potential violation of different laws under the jurisdiction of the FTC, including the Robinson-Patman Act. This vote is a signal to every private antitrust lawyer, state attorney general, and judge, that the Robinson-Patman Act can once again be dusted off and used.

Insulin is a great test case for this law, because everyone knows how unfair and inefficient the insulin market truly is. It’s a medication that has been around since 1922, and yet it has been increasing in cost every year for decades. And while the three main producers engage in all sorts of schemes to push up cost, most of the high cost of insulin is actually a result the middlemen named pharmacy benefits managers - CVS Caremark, Cigna (Express Scripts), and United Healthcare (OptumRx) - who manage and control how medicine is priced and sold. PBMs demand rebates of up to 70% for the right to have an insulin company sell their product to patients. These rebates in turn massively drive up the price of insulin.

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