Video: Monopoly -- Anti-Free Market Propaganda for Economically Ignorant Conservatives
The full title is: Monopoly -- Who Owns the World? I cannot begin to tell you how silly this video is. But I am going to try.
The video is anti-free market to the core. It is the same old sales pitch of the Progressive movement ever since 1900: "Those rich bastards are stealing us blind in the stock market." How "we" lost wealth because of a tiny number of rich people's profits in the stock market was never made clear. It is not made clear in this video, either. Fortunately, the video offers no solution. The Progressives did . . . and still do: more federal regulation.
The video was produced by Tim Gielen. I went to Amazon to see if he has written a book. He has not. I went online to see if he has a website. He does not. He needs one to provide links and footnotes to studies that would prove the outrageous claims that he makes in the video. There is no such website. "Footnotes? I don't need no stinking footnotes!"
For all I know, Tim Gielen is an alias for somebody named Joe Blow . . . except for his accent.
He is on Facebook. He is on Twitter. But he has no website. In short, he is 100% dependent on the people he says are out to conquer the world. How dumb is that strategy? Really, truly dumb.
Before demonstrating the utter incoherence of this documentary, I will quote Murray Rothbard. This is from Man, Economy, and State (1962). Here is what he wrote about monopoly.
Before investigating the theory of monopoly price, we must begin by defining monopoly. Despite the fact that monopoly problems occupy an enormous quantity of economic writings, little or no clarity of definition exists. There is, in fact, enormous vagueness and confusion on the subject. Very few economists have formulated a coherent, meaningful definition of monopoly (p. 661).
The narrator at no point defines monopoly. You might imagine that he would, since the video is called Monopoly. This is a tip-off that the video was produced by someone with little understanding of free market economic theory. Yet the video is all about the economy.
THE VIDEO'S CRUCIAL ERROR
The video assumes that ownership of corporate shares indicates control over the economy, meaning control over consumers.
He argues that a handful of investment funds own a large percentage of American shares. This is easy to prove. What is not easy to prove is that ownership of shares conveys control over consumers.
The narrator misunderstands the economic function of the stock market. The stock market lets profit-seeking investors buy and sell shares of ownership of companies.
What is the goal of owners? To make money.
What is the business strategy of making money? Making an economic profit: bringing in more revenue than costs.
Making money requires that businesses serve customers. The shareowners are not trying to control the buyers. They are trying to figure out which companies customers will favor.
The investors' goal is not power. It is money.
This video argues that a handful of large investment funds are seeking power. It does not prove this. It simply tells us that these funds own profitable companies.
Over and over, the narrator uses the word "power." He never uses the word "profit." This is a tip-off. His analysis is not based on economic theory. It is based on some unstated theory of international political power.
SCAREMONGERING WITH STATISTICAL POPPYCOCK
He begins the video with the startling statement that hundreds of millions of people around the world have become impoverished. Then he provides a few brief videos clips related to the coronavirus. He does not explain the connection. He says that we are all going to be impoverished soon. He does not tell us why.
In fact, the world economy has grown in 2021. There was no economic catastrophe due to the lockdowns. Yet in the second half of the video, the narrator ties his theory of the imposition of a New World Order to an economic collapse created by the pandemic.
This video's thesis makes no sense.
The economic fact is this: there has been a more rapid escape from poverty over the last 30 years than at any time in the history of mankind. The United Nations estimated in 1990 that 36% of the world lived in abject poverty. In 2015, the UN estimated that this had fallen to 10%. We can see this illustrated in the marvelous TED talk videos produced by Hans Rosling. Watch his 2007 TED talk. It will amaze you.
The Monopoly video argues without any proof whatsoever that an elite of superrich individuals are attempting to impoverish the masses. If you are familiar with the history of Marxism, you will recognize this argument. It is a variation of Marx's theory of surplus value. It was wrong in 1867, and it is wrong today. Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk refuted it in 1896. You can read it here.
To help immunize yourself against this preposterous argument, consider the following. If the masses become impoverished, the share prices of the companies that sell goods and services to the vast majority of now-impoverished people will fall like a stone. The basis of the wealth of the elite is that they own shares of companies that sell goods and services to billions of people. If these elitists are trying to impoverish the masses, then they are following a self-destructive policy.
The narrator never mentions this. That is because he does not believe in the free market. He does not believe that consumers are in charge. He does not offer a theory of the free market. He just offers accusations that this elitist conspiracy is seeking power
At the very beginning of the video, the narrator misinforms the viewers about a looming economic apocalypse. Why? In order to produce fear. Fear makes viewers more willing to accept the video's unsupported accusation that an elite is attempting to impoverish us all.
Sadly, there is a large market for this kind of harem-scarem nonsense. There always has been. But this guy is trying to sell Marx's analysis to conservatives and libertarians. Incredibly, some are swallowing this thesis. I hate to tell you where I saw positive reports on this preposterous video. It is on a libertarian site that I do not want to embarrass.
To understand the video's many fallacies, I begin with money.
DEFINING MONEY
Ownership of money is widely dispersed. Ludwig von Mises, following Carl Menger, defined money as the most marketable commodity. This definition was the basis of Mises' masterpiece, The Theory of Money and Credit (1912).
Money is what businesses seek.
Businesses want what consumers own: money. They must serve consumers to get rich.
This is the heart of free market economic theory. This goes back to Adam Smith. Deny this analysis, and you thereby deny free market economic theory. The narrator denies it.
He argues that an elite owns most of the world's wealth. This is nothing new. Vilfredo Pareto wrote about this in 1897. He concluded that about 20% of the people in every European nation he studied owned about 80% of the wealth in that country. This is the famous Pareto distribution of 20/80.
The distribution is known as a power law. It goes all the way up. This means that about 20% of the 20%, or 4% of the population, will own about 64% of the wealth (80% of 80%). It also means that 0.8% of the population (20% of 4%) will own about 51% (80% of 64%) of the wealth. Any time that we find a deviation from this distribution, we should look for reasons to explain it. It is not easy to do this, since nobody knows why the initial Pareto distribution exists. It is the great mystery of modern economic theory. There is no agreed-upon explanation.
I recommend this approach. Whenever you find a deviation from the Pareto distribution, look for some kind of government intervention that protects certain owners of capital from the competitive effects of the free market. This is not what the narrator in the video does.
First, however, make sure that the person who asserts the existence of this deviation has detailed statistical evidence supporting his statement. He may just be blowing smoke.
The narrator never offers an economic explanation for this abnormal concentration of wealth. He also does not offer any footnotes to detailed studies that prove that this distribution exists. He just says that it does. He quotes Oxfam, a Leftist organization in Great Britain.
If he blamed specific government policies or central-bank policies for this abnormal distribution of wealth, I would be willing to pay more attention to the details of his argument. But he does not. This means that he blames the free market. It was a free market that let these people accumulate lots of corporate shares. What is the matter with that? There is nothing wrong with it morally. It is not a failure of the market that successful investors accumulate ownership of companies. So, what does he want us to do with his information? Share it, he says. But then what? He never says. He has no program of reform.
Then why produce the video?
"Look, Ma, I'm on YouTube!" So are a lot of crackpots.
I recommend that you follow this rule. "If a video calls attention to a problem, but does not offer a theory of why the problem exists, ignore the video." Here are other rules. "If the video offers a plausible explanation for the problem, what does it offer as a solution? Is the solution consistent with solving the problem? Will the solution make things worse? Who is going to impose the solution? What are his incentives for imposing the solution? Does the solution involve badges and guns? If so, do not join the movement."
SUMMARY
First, this video is anti-free market. It is really warmed-over Marxism.
Second, the video tries to connect the pandemic with a looming economic collapse. But there has been no collapse. The world economy continues to grow.
Third, the video says that there is an elite seeking power. It offers no examples of how the elite attains power by owning stock market mutual funds. It shows that a handful of funds own a high percentage of the shares. Problem: the funds invest in terms of gaining a profit, and the basis of gaining a profit in a free market society is a service to consumers.
Fourth, the video tells us that this elite group of superrich people plans to impose world taxation policies that are going to impoverish those few of us who are not wiped out by the economic collapse created by the pandemic. It does not say why politicians in every nation will legislate such taxes, or why voters will consent. It also does not ask this question: "If the superrich own most of the world, how much money can the rest of the world pay into the governments' tills?" Not much.
Fifth, and most tellingly, the video ends with a series of utopian promises to people who pass along this video. Anytime you see a video that promises world transformation by spreading a video that exposes the elite, you know you are dealing with somebody who believes in salvation by knowledge. Here is his list of promises to those who will share the video: a world with "no poverty, no pollution, diseases, or wars" (59:49). "If we all share this video, we can wake up humanity. Together we can stop corruption, and make a better world" (1:02:46). But he does not tell us exactly how we can do this. We cannot do it by sitting around a campfire and singing "Kum Ba Yah."
Sixth, he offers this hope. This world "is all on the horizon." Why should I believe this? Because Rumi said so. "The wound is the place where the light enters you." (1:00:26) And who is Rumi? He was a 13th-century Persian Sufi mystic. Somehow, I am not persuaded.
The video ends with a website: www.StopWorldControl.com. This site's home page features this video. But the site is limited strictly to discussions of the pandemic and government controls related to the pandemic. There is no mention of transforming humanity, saving the world, or anything else of a utopian nature.
CONCLUSION
This low-budget video is a good example of scaremongering, lousy statistics, anti-free market analysis, confusion of wealth and power, and utopian visions of world transformation (the NWO bad guys vs. mystics). It all hinges, in the name of anti-conspiracy, on one more conspiracy theory. It features the usual suspects: George Soros, Klaus Schwab, and Bill Gates.
The basic sales pitch is this: the free market is impotent. Consumers are impotent. An elite invested their money, which has made them rich, and somehow, in ways not explained, they have been able to leverage their wealth through investing in the free market into a total international system of universal despotism in which the elite will become the owners of the wealth of the whole world.
But if the statistics are accurate, they already own the world. That's the subtitle of the video: Who Owns the World? Why are they wasting time and money to get what they already have? Duh.
What will be the agency of enforcement of this universal despotism? The ultimate impotent bureaucracy: the United Nations.
The tiny American conservative movement bought into this theory back in the mid-1950's. They actually believed that the United Nations had meaningful power. It never did. The UN is a place where senior-level bureaucrats in Third World countries can live in New York City high on the hog, and be able to avoid paying parking tickets because they have diplomatic immunity. They love it. Their wives love it. It drives the NYPD nuts.
This video is one more example of H. L. Mencken's observation: Nobody ever went broke by underestimating the intelligence of the American public.
With this as an introduction, watch the video. Every time you hear nonsense, make a check mark on a piece of paper.