I spent part of yesterday afternoon making Economics Memes for my classes. You can find the results here. The memes are to complement my “Nine Principles of Economics” post and my IHS “Economics on One Foot” video.
Source link: http://archive.mises.org/20421/economics-in-one-meme/
Economics in One Meme
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Pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty good.
I thought that it was so good that I should made a Tumblr just for it and post more of them(and some translations). Please, if you want that I, for any reason, delete the site, mail me. Thanks and I apologize for my bad english
For the “fears gm foods, texts while driving” meme:
GM foods are not from the market, they’re from the State.
-The State subsidizes science and R&D which Big Agra uses to create GM foods
-The State enforces IP laws which allow monopoly rent-seeking in many ways, such as Monsanto being able to sue for IP infringement when any of their GM seed is found growing in a farmer’s field because it bounced off a open-topped truck and began to grow where it wasn’t purchased.
-The State centrally plans which crops should be grown in greater quantities and then directly subsidizes those crops (such as GM corn, which is grown at a loss until Federal subsidies are received)
-The State continues this central planning by raising trade barriers (like tariffs) to further distort the market in favor of Big Agra.
-The FDA and Big Agra as practically indistinguishable. Certainly these wonderful public servants have nothing but our best in mind when they craft policy that just accidentally happens to favor Big Agra/GM foods over smaller/natural competitors. Oh wait, readers of Mises.org aren’t that stupid (on the whole).
Etc…
We don’t have GM foods because consumers demanded them. We have GM foods because the GM food producers used the State to their advantage. As the State continues to reduce our natural food options (e.g., raw milk is a crime!?), GM foods will continue to prevail in the “marketplace”. Proof of the free-market where consumers are king (and thus non-GM foods would be prevalent if consumers really wanted them)? Nonsense. Get the State out of the food business (and every other business – as in abolish it) and then we can talk about consumer preference.
If you don’t mind eating GM foods, that’s fine for you. But it’s certainly not paranoia to be skeptical about the safety and quality of what is so clearly not a result of the market, but instead has the State stamped all over it. Nor does it make one a Luddite to be wary of the State messing with our food. The State ruins everything it touches, why would State planning of what we ingest be any different? “Fear” is a strong word, but certainly if a Austrian/Libertarian was not at least severely cautious about the food the State has given us, I’d have to question their critical thinking skills.
For an economist, it’s still an obvious example of subjective value in risk calculation.
@integral
If that was the intent of the meme, then I suppose I can see your point. It was not obvious to me that was the point though.
Though I don’t identify with “left” libertarianism, I have been sympathetic to their (left libertarians) criticisms of “thin or vulgar” libertarianism. I.e., The tendency to ignore or gloss over the distortions caused by the State when pointing to the current state of technology, property claims, and prosperity and instead present these as examples of “the market”.
Though Mr. Carden may have not meant it this way, I took “fears health effects of GM foods” to be a form of criticism towards those who, due to their anti-market mindset (like hippies) reject the bounties provided to us by the market.
“GM foods are not from the market, they’re from the State.”
GM foods are not an invention of the state. They are an invention of the market. You may not like them, and indeed I don’t eat them myself, but that doesn’t make them the product of the state. The market doesn’t produce only good things – it simply offers products and allows consumers to decide what is good on an individual basis.
You might argue that government distorts the market and artificially favors the GM food, but government does not invent. It cannot give us choices – it can only restrict them. Government is certainly restricting consumers from making a free choice, but it didn’t create GM foods.
@Jim – I thought it would be clear from my enumeration of how the State is involved in distorting the market to result in the prevalence of GM foods that I wasn’t literally suggesting that government workers created GM foods.
My point was that it was a political process that has brought us GM foods, not a market process. Yes, there have been voluntary choices made by consumers, but those choices are from an involuntarily restricted set of options. And not restricted by accident/natural result, but by active political intervention.
I don’t usually care for these things, but I really like The Most Interesting Man in the World one about beer and the Too Damn High one. You did a good job getting a point across while playing off the original idea in a clever way.
http://www.reddit.com/r/libertariancomics/
Oh god even the economics profession got infested with 4chanism.
Actually I gotta say, these kind of suck. Not one of theme is very meme-y. Leave this to the experts on reddit, 4chan, SA, etc.
Some of these might be a bit obscure for those unschooled in economics. Thats the problem with the modern soundbite culture – theres no space to advance a proper argument supporting a contention that seems counterintuitive to the layman, and when you go beyond 20 words, youve lost his attention anyway. the key to a successful soundbite ( or meme) is that it must feel viscerally self-evident immediately its heard, with no conscious thought and a sudden sense of ‘wow, thats so true!’ Sadly, this works even when its not true, but hooks into emotion or prejudice.
Hence the ongoing popularity of socialist/Marxist liberalism among a whole generation who should kn ow better. How can careful scholarly praxeological logic hope to compete in soundbite space with such noble-sounding pithy mythies as ‘all for one and one for all’, or ‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs’? Thus does poison lurk under apparently irrefutable sentimental glurge.
I once tried to distil the basic (classical) liberal economic message into a soundbite, a la Orwell, and the pithiest I could get was this ( Im not sure if its a poem or not), still hamfistedly stilted mouthful:
‘Markets do good
even when buyers or sellers try to cheat
and especially when they don’t.
Governments do evil
even when rulers have noble intentions
and especially when they don’t.’
But even that’s too cumbersome to make the visceral ‘AHA’ impact required. – it still invites a need to explain WHY.
Yeah, most of these are kind of plain… but it’s the same with memes in general, they’re abused and just not funny after some time.
I liked the college freshman ones though!
Clever, simple and well done.
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