No, You Can’t

Hey look, it’s HP’s people.

I love parodies. This one was edited by a friend of a friend. He’s the dude on the right in this photo.

9 thoughts on “No, You Can’t”

The video needs some brown or black folk in it since HP proves the status quo supporters come in all colors. Too bad he still can’t break into that group! 😉 Wot a nut.

February 15, 2008 at 6:24 pm

Yay you met your friend in Cambridge!

I’m with Chavo on this one. HP, is the status quo only white people?

February 15, 2008 at 7:54 pm

Watching this video I am reminded of a fundamental difference between the left and the right.

The left thinks that government would be better if only we elected a virtuous politician. The problem is not government, it is that we keep electing corrupt politicians. Get ‘a mother theresa’ in there and the world would be so much better. The government would work as it is ‘truly’ designed to.

The right thinks the problem is not the politicians, the problem is the power of government itself. It doesn’t matter who you elect as president, the incentives remain the same and as such, government will continue to behave like…well government. The solution is not in trying to find the ‘mother theresa’, the solution is to limit the power of government.

Russell Roberts explained the difference best when he wrote,

George Stigler used to contrast his theory of politics with Ralph Nader’s. In Nader’s view, all of the ugly aspects of government were caused by the wrong people getting elected. If we could just elect better people, then we’d get better policies. Stigler argued that it didn’t matter who the people were—once they got in office, they responded to incentives. They would convince themselves that they were doing the right thing, either because they really thought so or because doing the wrong thing was necessary in order to be able to do the right thing down the line.

This partially explains that old quote (falsely) attributed to Churchill, “If you’re not a liberal at twenty you have no heart, if you’re not a conservative at forty you have no brain”. There has to come a point, after yet another failed politician, where you look up and say, ‘maybe the problem is not politicians, maybe the problem is the government itself?’

February 16, 2008 at 4:51 pm

yes she can!

February 18, 2008 at 9:05 am

I’m scared. I totally agree with HP on this one. Anyone who is a politician in this American government is or will be corrupted by the ‘incentives.’

What I’m sure we still disagree on, which is the next logical step, is that the incentives are the fruits of capitalism, and that needs to be checked or done away with.

February 18, 2008 at 11:38 am

Were starting a trend here P-3000, be careful, pretty soon you’ll start making fun of Chicano Studies too. 😉

I see capitalism alot like Churchill saw Democracy, “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all other forms that have been tried.” Sure, capitalism has its flaws, but compared to the rest…there’s no competition.

February 18, 2008 at 9:11 pm