Let's Watch a Truly Bananas Libertarian Informercial
@freebroccoli asked, “Other ideologies create children's media to propagate their views, so why shouldn't we?”
And after thinking about it a bit the answer I came up with is, “Because those are badly made so you shouldn’t copy them.”
My longer thoughts pertain to this Tuttle Twins minisode/infomercial which has shown me an entire world that I had no idea existed. I know I said you can kind of skip the first episode but I need you all to watch this one because somebody needs to explain it to me.
Hey, so, uh, what the heck?
Okay, well, so, for context there’s at least one episode (The civil disobedience one) where the twins shoot a movie starring their Grandma’s pet Raccoon, as “Dark Dumpster Derek” which is his superhero name.
Honestly I kind of don’t get it as a superhero name.
You can get him as a plushie or a poster based on that episode.
And also I think if you watched this (And if you have YES I KNOW I will get there eventually) you’ve seen, like, half of the Dark Dumpster Derek stuff. Like even the actual episode about this that isn’t an infomercial still really doesn’t have a lot of him in the costume. If I put on my writer’s hat and look at that poster, I imagine a subplot where, through some shenanigans, maybe he gets mistaken for a real superhero or maybe he just is a real superhero when the twins aren’t around and he and Karinne get in some wacky adventure white the Tuttles are out talking to Friedrich Hayek or who the hell ever.
But there’s no time for stuff like that because we need to spend half of every episode for historical lectures!
This show spends so much time on dry educational (or “educational”) lectures that it noticeably takes time away from the fun parts of the cartoon. When it comes to kids shows, you’re always selling partly to the kids, and partly to the parents, but the ratio of who you are selling to more changes from show to show. And this show is selling hard to the parents.
And here’s the thing: I have no idea why parents would care what their kids think about the gold standard.
And yes, this particular bit is an ad but believe me, there are multiple episodes of the show that deal with sound money (You Mormon homeschoolers should probably not let your kids google “The Inflation Monster”).
And I truly don’t know why. It’s not so much “Why would people advocate for a return to the gold standard?” as “Why would people want a cartoon show to teach their kids about the wisdom of the gold standard?”
I mean, I’m pretty worried about Trump’s tariffs but it has not occurred to me to discuss the dangers they pose to free trade with my six year old niece.
I especially don’t understand why you’d sell this bonkers product through a children’s cartoon.
I’ll just say it: sort of seems like you’re just not very good at buying presents. Maybe next time bring the kids some ninja turtles and see how those compare.
Okay, I am amazed by this bizarre product.
One thing that drives me just as crazy about this as with bitcoin is that if you have a currency whose overall direction is deflationary but whose specific value swings wildly from day to day, and that’s paired with a currency that is overall subject to inflation but maintains a fairly steady value day to day (i.e. the dollar), then the incentives are going to be to treat the deflationary currency more like an asset, and when you need to buy things you won’t buy them directly with the deflationary currency, you’ll sell a bit of the deflationary currency for dollars. A goldback is going to be worth more in six months; a dollar a little less, so you never spend a goldback if you can spend a dollar instead. And since everybody is paid in dollars, you can always spend a dollar.
On the merchant side, it’s really hard to price things in a currency that fluctuates wildly in value. A single Goldback today is worth 34 cents more than it was worth a week ago. A goldback a week ago was worth 14 cents less than it was a week before that.
All of this is why your local 7/11 doesn’t take payment in Tesla stock, it is so weird to me how people just never seem to even bring this up in alternative currency circles.
Also, I don’t really understand how the gold standard works, it seems like for most people gold is only valuable because of the social agreement that it is valuable, but also, like… Maybe I’m just dumb but isn’t part of the point of a gold coin is that if you wanted you could just, like, melt it down and make it into jewelry? If these only have a tiny amount of gold can you, like, even get it back, and if you can’t is that in practice any different than fiat currency?
People on some subreddits have also pointed out that there is a manufacture cost to make these on top of the price of buying the gold to put in them, and that how this is priced in is not very transparent. Also the redditors keep mentioning “Stacking” a lot which is making my “Tulip Mania Alarm” go off at full volume.
But I think what I am most taken with here is that, like, all the bills for like, Utah and most of the states have these very old-fashioned 19th century looking designs with all kinds of symbolism and little animals and fillagrees like so:
But then the ones for Florida, and only the ones for Florida Are just, like
Sexy AI Pirate
Sexy AI Fighter Pilot
Sexy AI Statue of Liberty pulling a cruise ship (???)
I don’t know if they were just like, “Eh, clearly nobody in Florida has any taste just do whatever” or if this is the sign of a company that is rapidly running out of money to pay new artists.
Anyway. What is any of this? Seriously, please explain this to me.
I recently was given this thing called a Goldback. I know nothing of gold or precious metals or investing. I don’t even have a retirement plan outside of Social Security and if I’m able I hope to work until I’m 90 years old [God Willing].
As you can see this is a pretty cool looking item I suppose? It’s real gold, it’s thin and it has an interesting design on it. From what I understand these are…
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