 Falcon and Winter Soldier is the latest MCU show to drop on Disney+. It's gotten mixed reviews, and I'll be honest, there are several things I really don't like about the show. But as we got farther into the story, I think it added some missing context to the MCU, and I started to enjoy it more and more. So today, I thought I'd talk about a few themes that connect back to a lot of the ideas I've brought up in the past on this series, as well as some new ideas that I think should get way more serious attention. As some of you may recall from the two episodes I did on Thanos wiping out half of all life in the universe, the snap would have been insanely destructive in every possible way. It would have almost instantly impoverished billions of people and created widespread shortages of all sorts of goods and services, causing an array of horrible problems. However, whether or not the people of Earth found a way around those problems quickly depends entirely on how they responded to the crisis. And to my surprise, Falcon and Winter Soldier hints at one legitimate way the world actually might have been able to get back on track, at least within a few years. So I think we should talk about that. Of course, that also means we need to take a serious look at the Global Repatriation Council and Earth's very different response to Iron Man's unsnap. And while we're at it, I want to take a minute to talk about Captain America, why Steve Rogers represents a lot more than America's greatest values and why it would be completely impossible for politicians to replace him. We're going to get into all that and more on this thrilling episode of Out of Frame. After what I thought was a bit of a slow start, Falcon and Winter Soldier picks up on several plotlines from Marvel's movies and builds on the aftermath of the Avengers' Battle with Thanos in Avengers Endgame. Five years after half the population of Earth was snapped out of existence, everyone is magically returned to life, and the world is an entirely different place. Iron Man and Black Widow are dead, Captain America retired. The world desperately needs new heroes, but Bucky Barnes is in therapy and Sam Wilson rejected the opportunity to become the new Captain America. He chose to turn the shield over to the Smithsonian and take contract work running special ops for the US military instead. But most importantly, billions of people reappeared from non-existence, only to find themselves living in a world that doesn't have room for them anymore. It's bad. Living with the instantaneous doubling of the population is every bit as chaotic and destructive as having to cope with losing half the people on the planet at once, although of course their return is better for everyone in the long term. Unfortunately, the governments of the world seem to have responded to the second crisis by concentrating power in the hands of the Global Repatriation Council. As far as I can tell, the GRC is basically a new global government that creates a whole lot of chaos in its inevitably clumsy attempt to organize and control human action around the world. It's been given the power to command the allocation of land, resources, and labor, and to dictate the production, distribution, and use of goods and services. They even get to decide where people are allowed to live. The GRC has a lot of soft power, too, broadcasting friendly messages all over the world in order to convince the majority of people that they're in good hands. Reset. Restore. Rebuild. A global reset, huh? Sounds familiar. This is the kind of concentrated power and propaganda you generally see in socialist and communist dictatorships, so I guess we shouldn't be too surprised that there are a substantial number of people who aren't happy with GRC policies. That's why a group of terrorists — Revolutionaries, depending on whose side you're on — Right. Or that. Anyway, that's why a group of super soldiers led by a woman named Carly Morgenthau starts raiding supplies from the Global Repatriation Council, occasionally also blowing up buildings with people inside. And if all that weren't bad enough on its own, the US government decides to manufacture a new Captain America by giving his suit and shield to a decorated, regular human soldier named John Walker. I'll get back to that later, but it all sets up multiple points of conflict that I'm sure will continue to be major issues throughout the show and for the future of the MCU. Ultimately, Bucky and Sam team up to find and stop the terrorists while maintaining a tense relationship with fake Captain America and his partner, Lamar Hoskins. A lot of that stuff is pretty good, but also the show frequently undercuts its own characters and plot with some really clumsy writing, most of which only seems to exist to hammer Disney's woke agenda into the MCU. For the sake of time and staying on points, I'm not going to get into those issues here, but I'd be happy to talk about it in the comments. In spite of all that, Falcon and Winter Soldier is more like Captain America Winter Soldier or the first act of Civil War than any of the huge intergalactic epics we've seen since, and I'm very okay with that. I think it's important for Marvel to show the significance of the Infinity Saga for humanity as a whole, especially since that's something Marvel hasn't been very good at. We got a few glimpses of the human costs in Ant-Man and the Wasp, Spider-Man Far From Home and WandaVision, but they all focused more on people's feelings of loss rather than the material devastation that would have ravaged global economies on every planet in the universe. Thanos was not only an immoral monster, he was also just plain wrong to believe that a universe with half the population would result in more wealth for the people remaining rather than much, much less. As I said back then, more people doesn't just mean more mouths to feed, it also means more minds to create and more hands to build. Our standards of living are powered by specialization, division of labor, and trade. With a fraction of the people, we have a fraction of the knowledge and skills available to improve lives and create the goods and services that we've all come to rely on every day. I really can't overstate this point. Entrepreneurs working on cures for major illnesses, gone. Engineers developing new technology, gone. Experienced technicians who are the only people around who actually understand the intricacies and idiosyncrasies of an old cobbled-together network or production system, gone. Academics conducting basic research, entrepreneurs and inventors who turn that knowledge into practical solutions for human problems. Entrepreneurs who are willing to risk their money to support new ideas, talented communicators and storytellers who are able to convince the public to give those ideas a chance. All gone. Sure, there would still be some people doing the same types of jobs, but with half the trading partners available in the world and half the ideas and creativity, the rate at which human society advances would slow to a crawl. Society would need a lot of time to regain all the localized knowledge that was lost. Some of it would simply be irreplaceable. We'd all do the best we can to make up for all the missing pieces, but we would still need a rapid wave of effective entrepreneurship in order to rebuild the productive businesses that were destroyed. And only after the processes and systems that made mass production possible were up and running again, could we start to see material standards of living come back to something close to what they were before the disaster. But the only way people would even have a chance at achieving all that within a few years is if everybody was actually free to adapt. That requires individual autonomy, not centralized state control. Alas, that's not usually how policymakers respond to crisis. I mean, why bother when you can capture more power for yourself instead? However, thanks to Falcon and Winter Soldier, it sounds like the improbable may have actually happened in the MCU. In the fourth episode, we get a scene which explains that after the blip, the whole world dropped its nationalistic enmity and opened up their societies to peace, trade, and immigration. For five years, people have been welcomed into countries that have kept them out using barbed wire. There were houses and jobs. I'm speculating here a little bit, but between that and some of the things Carly Morgenthau says, it really seems like the world got a lot more free instead of less. Probably out of pure necessity, countries got more open to trade and commercial interaction, allowing people to move to parts of the world that had need of their skills and offered better opportunities. It sounds like they mostly just allowed people to find the best ways to adapt on their own. And if anything could have helped the world get through such a massive crisis quickly and with as little additional loss of life as possible, it would have been that. In the real world, this doesn't even happen after a flood or a tornado, let alone much bigger natural disasters. But I guess that's what we get in a world with half the politicians. But this also brings to mind another thing I said in my first video about Thanos. Wealth is a creation of human ingenuity and expands with every new valuable innovation. As long as people are free to be entrepreneurial and explore new ideas, in a context where other people are also free to decide for themselves which innovations are valuable to them, then wealth will increase. That last caveat is critical. The only way to significantly and consistently increase the total amount of real wealth in society is economic freedom. And if the world allowed more of that after Thanos' snap, then it might have been okay. Or at least not nearly as bad as it could have been. But if not, well, you really don't want to live in that world. Unfortunately, Falcon and Winter Soldier makes it clear that once everybody came back, global economic policy got reset to an even more restrictive set of conditions than we have now. Instead of trying to maintain a free and open society, the Global Repatriation Council seems to be designed to put people back where they left off, by force if necessary. It doesn't seem to matter to them that most returning people are no longer needed in the roles they use to inhabit. And by the way, it's not that their skills couldn't be valuable, including in many or even most of the same professions. It's just that the government has no idea how to decide who should be doing which jobs in which parts of the world. So to try to force people to move to certain regions or restrict what some people are allowed to do with their skills and resources, and by functionally asserting control over the means of production, the government is making an already serious problem much worse. This is an insanely difficult situation that needs a solution, but the answer will never be central planning. Allow me to explain. Societies, cultures, and economies are made up of individuals who each make unique contributions and who can't simply be moved into different roles or replaced by just anybody. The economy is not a machine being run by politicians, and people are not interchangeable cogs to be swapped in and out on a whim. Nobody can or ever could simply replace the millions of people who are snapped into nothingness by Thanos. The same is true for the stuff we produce and the systems that produce it. At any given moment in time, the economy has a very specific nature. You can't just take a factory that makes one thing today and magically make it produce something totally different tomorrow. And after five years of dealing with all the lost local knowledge and skills, the whole world's productive capacity would have been set up to make different things at a lower level of output than it was before the snap. This reflects a major change in what many economists refer to as the structure of capital. The particular way people have organized a society's productive resources, or capital, is what allows the goods and services we need to be reliably produced and brought to the people who want them. It's just not something you can toy with or easily reconfigure like Dr. Manhattan. To quote the great Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises, capital goods are intermediary steps on the way toward a definite goal. If in the course of the period of production, the goal is changed, it is not always possible to use the intermediary products already available for the pursuit of the new goal. In other words, if the overall capital structure of an economy is set up to produce 100 million cars in a year, there's no switch to flip that could get it to produce 200 million. All that extra rubber, steel, wiring, glass, and whatever other raw materials the factory needs is already allocated to other uses. And if a given factory was built to manufacture cars, it certainly won't be able to make boats or building materials, regardless of whether or not that's what we actually need more of right now. Heck, it might not even be able to make a different kind of automobile. Machinery needs to be retooled, new processes set up, workers retrained, different components and raw materials need to be acquired or created. And in some cases, even the buildings people work in need to be significantly modified. There's just no way around that. It will take time to adjust, especially if the government's response is to try to play God and ignore local knowledge altogether. In a world that's already struggling to adapt to a shocking new reality, billions more people suddenly needing resources, land, and goods and services that don't exist is, to put it mildly, a massive disruption. So what I'm saying is, Carly Morgenthau might have a point when she says life was better during the blip than it is now. She's just extremely wrong about how to deal with it. They started a war as soon as they kicked us out of our new homes and onto the street. But Sam, what if I'm making the world a better place? That's not a better place if you're killing people, it's just different. Carly needs to work towards a more peaceful world, not a less peaceful one. One thing I really hate about the show is how much effort goes into sympathizing with Carly's actions. They're roadblocks in my journey and I'll kill them again if I have to. That's a young woman admitting to having zero remorse for killing innocent people and Sam reacts like she just made an off-color joke. Carly isn't a good person and even if her character exposes a problem that does need to be addressed, her actions are unequivocally wrong. You really think her ends justify her means, then she's no different than him or anybody else we fought. But just because Carly is awful doesn't mean the GRC is off the hook. Just as central planning would have wrecked people's ability to adapt to new conditions after Thanos' snap, it would create the same kind of chaos in the wake of Iron Man's unsnap. Humanity control can only get in the way of restructuring an economy on the basis of people's new values and needs. People, their values and their productive capabilities can't just be swapped in and out however people in power want. But more often than not, that's the only solution people in power seem to be able to see. And that brings us to...Fake Captain America. As I said in the Justice League episode, it's not enough to simply look like a hero. You have to display heroic values by doing heroic things. John Walker does not. Do you know who I am? What makes Captain America special is not the big A on his chest or the star on his shield. It's the personal attributes and core values embodied by Steve Rogers. Steve is unique in that he's a principled man in a corrupt world where nearly anyone else with power uses it for coercion and personal gain. This is not only a major part of what makes him a hero, it's also an important part of the story in Falcon and Winter Soldier. One of my favorite things about this series is the expansion of Baron Zemo's character, especially in terms of his philosophy. All of the show's core storylines, Carly's, John Walker's, and even Bucky's, lead back to the point Baron Zemo made about the corrupting nature of power and the sense of superiority that typically goes along with it. There has to be a peaceful way to stop her. The desire to become a superhuman cannot be separated from supremacist ideals. Maybe you're wrong, Zemo. The serum never corrupted Steve. Touché. But there has never been another Steve Rogers has there. The fact that Steve's relationship to power is unique is why the brand of Captain America can't simply be taken by the government and handed to someone else. Plenty of people in the MCU can be trained to fight the way Steve does, and clearly it's possible to gain comparable physical strength, speed, and durability. But putting another guy in the same suit doesn't make him the same person. And if the values and attributes that built the Captain America name aren't upheld over time, that name gets tarnished. As I've been saying throughout this episode, people aren't interchangeable. And arrogant politicians and bureaucrats in government don't know what they don't know. They foolishly thought they could control something that has to happen organically and spontaneously. But that's not how this works. The government can't even get one state created super soldier right, no matter how many times they try to recreate the conditions that made Dr. Erskine's original experiment a success. John Walker was groomed to be America's perfect soldier. I only ever did what you asked of me, what you told me to be and trained me to do, and I did it well. On the other hand, Steve Rogers was repeatedly denied his request to join the army and fight in World War Two. Save me a life. Walker does what he's told. Steve personally took down shield and chose to become a fugitive instead of signing on to the Sokovia Accords because his code of ethics was stronger than any sense of patriotism or allegiance to the state. Perhaps most interestingly of all, when Steve is used to create propaganda, he's embarrassed and ashamed that he's not doing more to help win the war. And when he violates his orders to mount a rescue mission and saves a platoon of POWs, he submits himself to be court marshaled when he gets back to base. He's a great man, but actually kind of a terrible soldier. Walker is the opposite, obeying orders without having the conscience or courage to do what's right. The danger with people like him, America's super soldiers is that we put them on pedestals. You built me. They become symbols, icons, and then we start to forget about their flaws. I am Captain America. From there, cities fly, innocent people die, movements are formed, wars are fought. Do we want to live in a world full of people like the Red Skull? They just do not know what it takes to be Captain America. They just don't. Politicians picked John Walker because he had the right training, the right credentials, the right look. But they ignored the most crucial aspect of what it means to be Captain America. A word of advice, then, stay the hell out of my way. Language. Now, imagine making this kind of mistake literally a billion times over. Imagine the hubris it takes to believe you have the authority to control people's lives and then repeatedly send the wrong resources and people to do the wrong jobs in the wrong parts of the world. The Global Repatriation Council promised to send more teachers, supplies. That was six months ago. Imagine thinking that you can override other people's choices and replace millions of individuals collected knowledge with your own. If you can imagine all that, then you can begin to understand why giving the state the power to dictate how to adapt to an economic catastrophe like the blip would create an even bigger disaster. If we've seen one thing over the last year, it's that governments around the world will always respond to crisis by grabbing more power. A year ago, they used emergency powers to force millions of people out of work, creating a result comparable to what Thanos would have created. When it first started happening, I sounded some alarms that perhaps very few people ever wanted to hear. But a lot of what I talked about then is starting to materialize. And more people are now experiencing the consequences of those decisions after a year of lockdowns and restrictions that paused or ended the production of all sorts of goods and services, an unprecedented increase in government spending and the largest expansion of the money supply in US history. Well, the bill comes due. Prices for food, energy, housing and building supplies are all rising sharply. Meanwhile, millions of people are still out of work with an unemployment rate that peaked at almost 15 percent and even now is double what it was prior to the lockdowns. Entire industries are being destroyed, and many of those jobs are definitely not coming back. This has happened because governments all over the world have acted more like the Global Repatriation Council, thinking that they are better suited to plan entire economies, choosing who is or is not essential and controlling what people are allowed to do instead of leaving people to be free to adapt and innovate using their specific skills and knowledge. What we needed a year ago was a carefully targeted approach, protecting the most vulnerable while upholding the principles of a free society for everyone else. And as I said on the series, the last time I talked about Captain America, freedom doesn't just make us more independent. It also makes us more flexible and agile when those traits are the most needed. That kind of entrepreneurial flexibility would have been incredibly beneficial and might have actually saved countless lives over the past 12 months, not just from the pandemic, but from all the other diseases and dangers that a lot of people have been busy ignoring. But we'll never know because we traded freedom for false promises of security. And now we're all left to deal with the wreckage. And once again, how we deal with it makes a difference. While many people will turn to the state doubling down on the belief that it has answers, it's not remotely suited to provide. Some will become paralyzed by guilt and uncertainty. Others will turn their anger into violence. But I challenge you to take a different path. Reject the notion that giving other people unlimited power is somehow necessary for security and salvation. It isn't. The world does not need more mindless allegiance to authority. What it needs is more individuals using their own talents and ideas to solve problems. It needs more entrepreneurs, more innovators, more risk takers, and it needs more freedom for each person to be able to choose the solutions that work best for them. Instead of allowing authority figures to force a one-size-fits-all approach on everyone, you don't have to be a super soldier to make a difference. And you don't have to save the whole world in order to make it a little better. You have the power. Now don't abuse it. Hey, everybody, thanks for watching this episode of Out of Frame. I know I left out a lot of other themes that are pretty prominent in Falcon and Winter Soldier, so let me know what you think about the show in the comments. And if you want to participate in even more discussion, we recently opened up our Discord to the public and it's growing fast. We'd love to see you there. Also, definitely check out our Behind The Scenes podcast. The audio is available all over the place. But if you prefer a video version, we've set up a YouTube channel just for that. It comes out every Friday, but our Patreon and Subscribestar supporters get early access and special bonus content. And speaking of our supporters, I especially want to thank our associate producers to Connor McGowan, Richard Lawrence, Matt Tabor and Vega Starlight. Thank you. Find the links to support the show and everything else I talked about in today's episode in the description below. And as always, be sure to like this video and subscribe to the channel, ring that bell icon and look for our out of frame accounts on TikTok, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. See you next time.