In other news, water is wet, bears crap in the woods, and the pope is Catholic.
Actors, by and large, have little education in history or economics. Most of them also happen to live in an area where the class differences are extremely stark; thus, if they have any compassion whatsoever, they're going to feel guilty about making millions screaming at green screens while other Californians are sleeping in their cars. Seriously: it's pretty much a given.
What does this mean? Well, it means I shrugged and got on with my life when Mark Ruffalo put his ignorant foot in his mouth on Twitter. Actor follows the pack and says idiot leftist thing? Ooh, big story.
Obviously, Ruffalo is wrong. Capitalism isn't killing us. Capitalism - or, to use a term that wasn't coined by our enemies, voluntary human cooperation - is what's going to save our butts. Hell, it's saving lives already. Extreme poverty, infant mortality, starvation - the trends for all of those are extraordinarily positive, and they correlate with a global increase in economic liberty. Where there's no liberty, on the other hand, we see environmental degradation and human immiseration.
Want a big Scandinavian-style welfare state? As any Scandinavian will tell you, it's the market economy that enables that sort of government spending. Want to save the environment? (I know I do!) Well, you need wealth and innovation to do that -- and to have wealth and innovation, you need freedom.
The woes Ruffalo is probably seeing around Hollywood are not the result of capitalism. On the contrary, they are the result of state interference. Ordinary people can't find affordable places to live in California because state and municipal governments have rendered it almost impossible to build anything new. Ordinary people find it difficult to make a decent living in part because, once again, government has imposed unnecessary licensing laws and minimum wages that artificially raise the bar for entry.
So Mr. Ruffalo - bruh - I think I know where you're coming from, but the facts are just not on your side. Please look into what's going on in Venezuela as we speak. Please look into the history of China or the Soviet Union. And while you're at it, please read a little more on the laws of supply and demand. Perhaps then you can opine on our current problems without accidentally making things worse.
Yes, I know: this political post is out of sequence. I figured I needed to jump on this story right away, so I've pushed the weekly Iron Man post to Friday and the weekly "geeky" post to Sunday.
Never pay attention to people who play pretend for a living. They are all about feelings and "the narrative". Reality (like the fact that Capitalism has lifted humanity to heights no Emperor, King, or Pharoh could have imagined) dare not intrude on their precious minds. It also helps that they are rich enough to be immune to any bad consequences their bone headed policies might produce.
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