Penn & Teller: Bullshit! Explain Wealth Redistribution

Clip from Penn and Teller: Bullshit, season 7, episode 7. This clip is property of Showtime.
Penn Jillette is one of the greatest people in our nation's history, and certainly one of the most kindhearted and patriotic, in the truest sense of the word.

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[Jason Castle]

But where does the pie come from?

[zel9999]

For this to be accurate teller would have to have like a billion pies.

[jakebrakeify]

Many Bullshit! episodes are just a platform for Penn Jillette's Libertarian politics. He uses typical propaganda techniques of editing interviews to make people look foolish followed by reasonable-sounding "experts" to support his views who are employees of Libertarian or extreme Conservative political PR firms like like the Hudson Institute or the Tennessee Center for Policy Research. A less naive audience would quickly refute the "facts" they recite with a few minutes of web surfing .

[Anonymous1337lulz]

teller made it.

[Jarkko Ohaniemi]

I thought they were smart guys, this just makes them look like total douches. Nice straw man, guys.

[IARRCSim]

is it better to have the poor get poorer than to have progressive taxation? Many think it is really bad to have the majority of power in the hands of a few people. That's what communism and dictatorships are based on. That kind of centralized power is the problem with the huge wealth disparity(1% population - over 34% of wealth in US at present). Progressive taxation is a small effort to prevent capitalism from going very wrong.

[Socoolscienceshow]

If only sex worked this way, "Im not taking pussy from you, Im giving pussy to me, you see I don't have pussy so I gave pussy to me."

[captainjack77]

That's understandable.

I don't agree with everything Locke said, either lol.

[9Bushnell]

Yeah, fair enough.

I said I agreed with a Kantian idea, not the categorical imperative.

[captainjack77]

They were considered an empire, so my terminology works, but I'm not here to argue semantics.

Kant, huh? Well, Kant said that the categorical imperative is a universal, non negotiable moral law, that holds up regardless of context and circumstance, right?

Well we can both agree that slavery is immoral, I'm sure. Now we need to define a slave - one who does not own their own labor. Now, from this, it's clear, according to Kant, who you agree with, that income taxation is morally unjust.

[9Bushnell]

I was just saying it was a bad analogy because it can be used the other way round.

The Soviet Union (not Empire), and the Khemer Rouge, and countless other "Socialist" parties and states that have committed atrocities have been dictatorships; this contradicts with the Marxist definition of Socialism.

I disagree with Hobbes personally, I agree with Kant when he said that human knowledge is confined by experience. Locke or Rousseau could be right. Or they might not :P

[captainjack77]

Yeah, like Apple. How dare they steal our money, forcing us to buy iPhones. I mean, we as consumers don't have ANY say in the matter.

I love the Marxist wording of your comment, too!

Wasn't it great when the Soviet Empire killed 62 million of its own citizens? The Khemer Rouge was pretty great, too! Several million killed under that Totalitarian regime,

As Hobbes said, people are born dicks, and need an absolute athority. John Locke's ideas about equality of opportunity were so dumb....