 Squid Game on Netflix is the insane mega hit that absolutely nobody saw coming. This grisly Korean drama from writer-director Hong Dong-hyuk is the most popular series on Netflix ever. And it isn't even close. It's so popular, the platform decided to change the way it measures viewership. Congratulations to Netflix and to everyone who loved the show. But personally, I kinda hated Squid Game. Now, the great thing about living in a relatively free society is that there's no king or czar demanding that we all watch the same stuff. So I don't normally have to consume content that I don't like. But not this time. To be fair, the show's popularity alone would have probably made it worth talking about, but so many of you insisted that I respond to Squid Game's scathing critique of capitalism that I had to see if that was true. So stick around and find out on today's short edition of Out of Frame. I'm not sure this is even possible, but if you've somehow managed to miss it, Squid Game is about a whole bunch of extremely desperate people. Some are faced with crippling debts while others are fresh out of prison, terminally ill, or struggling to provide for their families. These people, all 456 of them, are offered a life-changing amount of money in exchange for playing a series of children's games. If they lose, so they're told, they'll just be eliminated. Easy, right? Well, what becomes graphically clear during the first game is that elimination means they will be violently murdered. What ensues is a brutal and bloody struggle for survival among the players and an ongoing series of terrible things done by terrible people. Our main character, Gi-hoon, is a divorced, deadbeat dad who has gambling debts he's unable to pay off. He can't even afford to help his mother with rent. He's also stealing from her, by the way. Another primary character is Gi-hoon's childhood friend, Sang-woo, who was a poor kid that went to business school and got a good job in finance. However, he's been embezzling from his clients to pay off a string of failed investments. We also have a thuggish mid-tier gang leader, the most annoying con artist imaginable, and a terminally ill, bumbling old man. I don't find any of them to be sympathetic at all. In fact, the only two characters I felt much of anything for were Sa-byok, the North Korean defector and Peck Pocket, and Ali, the Pakistani immigrant who accidentally caused his former boss's hand to get crushed in heavy machinery. As I said, I didn't enjoy this show, but I can understand why other people would. When compared to the vast majority of bland, sanitized, intentionally inoffensive hashtag content that's been put out this past year, Squid Game certainly stands out as a study of some of the darkest aspects of human nature. Its direction and set design are top notch, and the actors are quite good. It's just, I don't think it's particularly healthy to spend nine hours wallowing in misery and human suffering. Shows like this reinforce viewers' worst assumptions and beliefs about other people, and in this case, Squid Game paints a very distorted picture of the world. And let's be honest, we've got too much of that already. Much like another breakout hit from South Korea, Parasite, Squid Game is a bit of a rorschach test for Western audiences. On the one hand, it's focused on telling the stories of people who made very specific life choices that led them down the wrong path. It's about universal human failings, like greed and despair. But at the same time, many of these people also blame the system for the economic situations they're in. And since the system in South Korea is essentially a private market economy, a lot of reviewers seem to believe that Squid Game is some kind of a dunk on what they call late stage capitalism. Even the North Korean government, Impressive Beacon of Wealth and Freedom that it is, announced its approval of Squid Game's supposedly anti-capitalist commentary. But like, prominent screen time goes to a character who barely escaped North Korea with her life. Her father was shot and killed trying to defect, and her whole motivation for participating in the games is to get enough money to support her little brother and rescue her mom, who's still stuck on the wrong side of the border. Squid Game certainly doesn't make North Korea's brand of totalitarian communism look very fun. But even so, I'm told that the game itself, with all its brutality, dehumanization, and unflinching violence, is supposed to be an allegory for the reality of dog-eat-dog capitalism. Or something. But if that was really the intent of the show's producers, it would only demonstrate a severe misunderstanding of what capitalism is actually about. At its core, capitalism is simply the private, that is, non-government ownership, of what we might call the means of production. Put a little more accurately, it's an economic system characterized by private or corporate ownership of capital goods, by investments that are determined by private decision, and where prices, production, and the distribution of goods and services is determined mainly by competition in a free market. Marxist often use the word to describe an entire class of people, but in economics, capital is any good or service that gets used in the production of the stuff other people will ultimately buy and consume, what we call final goods. Money can be capital, but there's way more to it than that. Capital is also patents and trademarks, equipment and tools, computers and machinery, facilities, and even just the knowledge and systems needed to produce final goods and services. The thing is, an even more important aspect of capitalism is its association with free enterprise or free markets. Historically, what we now call capitalism was a deliberate rejection of top-down economic systems, coinciding with the rise of liberalism and the philosophy of individual rights. For the first time, it allowed producers and consumers to choose whether or not to interact with each other based on their own subjective evaluation of the costs and benefits of the proposed exchange in an open competitive market. Instead of being forced to do whatever government officials or violent warlords commanded them to do, that's a good thing. It's this concept of individual ownership and freedom of choice that actually separates capitalist economies from other economic systems, like mercantilism, which I talked about at length in the episode on Dune, or socialism and communism. What's more, countries which have successfully adopted most of these principles have seen dramatic increases in their standards of living, personal incomes, public health, and environmental quality, and they consistently outperform less free economies across every measurable metric for quality of life. South Korea is a good example of what I'm talking about. At the end of World War Two, North and South Korea were one country, reeling from Japanese colonization and military occupation by both the US and the Soviet Union. Without going through the whole history of the Korean War, by 1953 the North and South split, with Kim Il-Sung's communist regime on one side, and South Korea's mostly free market system on the other. While the North continues to be a brutally repressive impoverished nightmare, South Korea is now one of the wealthiest and most advanced countries in the world. That doesn't mean it's perfect or that it doesn't have any problems, but it would be pretty insane not to see the massive differences here. And that's where Squid Game completely loses me. Almost all of Gi-Hoon's problems are self-inflicted. In spite of being reasonably healthy, physically capable, and possessing at least average intelligence, he doesn't do anything remotely productive. He doesn't even try to create value for anybody. Instead, he steals, lies, cheats, and generally doesn't live up to his promises. He mooches off of everyone else, and then blames them when things go wrong. The system isn't at fault here. He is. One of the most offensive moments in the show, for me, was when a bunch of people compared the difficulty of finding a job to being shot at by mass murderers and watching 50% of the people around you die every day. What? Yes, entrepreneurs compete with each other in market economies, but it's to see who's best at providing for the needs and desires of their customers. And we're all rewarded with better standards of living. Far from being exploitative, capitalism as a system harnesses human's natural self-interest in a way that makes serving your fellow man an essential requirement for success. The trouble starts when governments interfere with that system. We actually see this happen in the show. In Episode 7, the VIPs goad the frontman into altering the rules mid-game. This changes the playing field in a way that affects the outcome, despite the frontman's previous assurances that the games are completely fair. That scene is not so much an allegory for capitalism as it is for cronyism and government intervention. When the state creates or changes laws, rules, and regulations to control economic activity, it often tips the scales, favoring some people and harming others. The more powerful the government is, the stronger incentives people have to try to influence the rules to benefit themselves, often at the expense of their competitors and consumers. Are we really surprised when wealthy, politically connected corporations are the big winners whenever the government imposes new taxes and complex regulations that smaller entrepreneurs can't afford to comply with? This isn't fair, and that's not a free market. Unfortunately, a lot of people mistakenly blame capitalism for problems that are actually caused by government intervention. I think that's what's really going on with Squid Game. If anything, it's a commentary on cronyism and violent authoritarianism, but more than anything, it's just a show about characters who actively choose not to take responsibility for themselves and wind up being destroyed by their own greed. It's definitely not a story about the evils of too much economic freedom. Now, I'm gonna go enjoy my freedom and never watch this show again. Hey everybody, thanks for watching. You can't claim to have a free market that is also managed and controlled by the state for the benefit of a small number of favored individuals and large corporations. Those are completely contradictory concepts, and yet in almost every case where I've discussed the evils of capitalism with someone else, their beef has not been with the result of free markets, but rather with the parts of the market that aren't free. I'm sure I'll find more than a little of that in the comments. If you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to give it a like and share it with your friends, subscribe to the channel, and hit that bell icon so you get to see new episodes every month, and join us on Discord for lots more conversation about interesting stuff like this. And if you really love what we do, please consider supporting us on Patreon or subscribe star. There's all sorts of great perks for signing up, and we'll love you forever for it. As always, don't forget to find us on Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram. I'll see you next time.