A YouTube channel called Maxinomics, which has 587,000 subscribers and the kind of production budget that doesn’t come from somebody’s garage, dropped a 37-minute video on August 7 about socialism versus capitalism. It has 614,000 views and 28,000 likes. The video walks you through Karl Marx writing Das Kapital in poverty, through divided Berlin where one side had grocery stores and the other side had a 10-year wait for a car called the Trabant, through the Nordic countries that the video helpfully explains are “free-market economies with big safety nets, not socialist states.” The whole thing is polished, confident, and lands on the same conclusion every one of these channels always lands on: the system you’re living under is the best one available, so stop asking questions.
Ask yourself who benefits from a 37-minute video that cost real money to produce, that gets pushed to 587,000 people, and that tells you central planning doesn’t work and price signals are the only honest language an economy speaks. I’m not saying Maxinomics is a CIA front. I’m saying when every well-funded “educational” channel on the platform arrives at the same answer, you’re not being educated. You’re being managed.
JamesRamen (CC BY-SA 3.0) via Wikimedia CommonsOver on the socialism subreddit, somebody posted the video and immediately spotted the problem. The video uses “Leninist-Marxist” to represent the whole of socialism. That’s like using Bernie Madoff to represent the whole of capitalism and then asking why nobody trusts the stock market. The poster also noted there’s “an awful amount of padding to get to the question actually being asked.” Thirty-seven minutes to say what every economics textbook already says. But padding is the point. You pad it so it feels like a journey, so the conclusion feels earned instead of handed to you.
Meanwhile the Democrats subreddit took the same video and spiraled into a debate about whether FDR was a democratic socialist or a capitalist. Multiple people pointed out that FDR saved capitalism from itself, that he was “the most important capitalist in American history,” that calling him a socialist is absurd. Someone noted that a modern FDR would get called an “establishment CorpoDem” by his own voters. That’s the real punchline. The left can’t even agree on what to call their own hero from 80 years ago, and they expect to run a country.
Tobias-Maverick Neumann (CC BY-SA 3.0) via Wikimedia CommonsHere’s what nobody in either thread wants to talk about. The video says Nordic countries aren’t socialist. Fine. But it also says their big safety nets work because they sit on top of free markets. So the implication is: you can have a safety net, but only if you keep the market engine running at full throttle. Funny how that always comes with a catch. Funny how the safety net always seems to shrink while the engine revs louder. Funny how the people making these videos never seem to be the ones choosing between groceries and rent.
The Berlin grocery store comparison is the part that always gets me. Two stores, 20 minutes apart, one full and one empty, and we’re supposed to conclude that this settles it forever. As if the only two options are Soviet central planning or whatever we have now. As if there’s nothing between a Politburo and a monopolistic tech oligarchy that owns your data, your attention, and the algorithm that decided you should watch this video in the first place.
Fototrommer (CC BY-SA 4.0) via Wikimedia Commons614,000 people watched a well-produced YouTube channel tell them the system is fine. The system is always fine, according to the people the system is working for.