 People would always say, you know, they talk about Ebenezer Scrooge. By the way, it's my favorite piece of fiction ever as a Christmas Carol. It's like the Fifth Gospel. Yeah. But the Christmas Carol, Ebenezer Scrooge, it really is a story of a liberal becoming a conservative. Because remember, when they came to him for donations, he said, are there no prisons? Are there no poor houses? These are government-run entities. In other words, in his mind, it was, that's off my plate. Right. I don't need to do anything about it. The government's supposed to handle it. And then after his moment of redemption, he said, you know what? It is up to me to give the charity. It is up to me to be a good Christian, to do the Christian thing, to help my fellow man. It is not up to me to just pass it off to the government. You just listened to Stephen Crowder. And if you watched closely, you can actually see the point flying over his head, because goddamn, did he miss that shit? So he got it completely backwards. Okay, he says that this is a story of a liberal becoming a conservative when the opposite is true. Now, his logic is that, well, since Ebenezer Scrooge wanted to pass off the responsibilities of housing the homeless, feeding the hungry to the government. Well, that makes him a liberal because they're big government and big government bad, except that's not the mentality of a character like Ebenezer Scrooge and other rich people. The mentality is, fuck you, I got mine. He just didn't care. So if the government did or didn't handle those issues, he would still be ambivalent because he was a greedy, rich asshole until the three ghosts visited him and convinced him to not be that way. Now, the reason why in actuality, he was a conservative who became a liberal is because conservatives have that individualist mentality. They believe that people fundamentally are on their own. And if you just leave people alone, then they will flourish. You don't need government intervention. Now, even though Stephen Crowder is wrong to say that Ebenezer Scrooge was a liberal who became a conservative eventually, he wouldn't be wrong if he just said that the overall message of a Christmas carol was relatively conservative because, quite frankly, it was. It demonstrates how neoliberal capitalism is a sufficient method of distributing goods and services to those who are less fortunate. That's an inherently pro-capitalist message. So while Ebenezer Scrooge himself may have become a liberal, we have no reason to think that Ebenezer Scrooge became a socialist and abandoned capitalism because he was keeping his wealth even if he wanted to be a little bit more charitable. So at its core, a Christmas carol, the story of Ebenezer Scrooge is a pro-capitalist story. Why? Because this is a story that suggests all we have to do is convince these rich people to be more charitable. It's not the system that's the issue. It's individual grade. It's bad character from people like Ebenezer Scrooge. Vox explains some have read a Christmas carol as espousing socialism, but the book doesn't decry capitalism. To be sure, Dickens condemns greed, but that is just one negative effect of a free market, not its defining feature. In Dickens, the remedy to greed is not socialism, it's charity. After being convinced by three spirits to mend his ways, Scrooge does in fact improve himself and become something of a philanthropist. He provides dinner for the cratchets and medical care for tiny Tim, none of which would have been possible for Scrooge if he hadn't been a successful shrewd businessman. In other words, capitalism was the very condition that made Scrooge's philanthropy possible. Scrooge's wealth, Dickens argues, is actually a very good thing when generously distributed. And generously distributed, mind you, not by forcing these rich people to pay taxes, but by convincing them that philanthropy and charity is good. Why? Well, it benefits them because it helps improve their image, right? So the underlying message is fundamentally pro-capitalist because there isn't this sense from Dickens that the system is the problem. The problem really is individual greed. And if billionaires can just be convinced to willingly give up more of their money, then everything is going to be better. Capitalism allows them the wealth to take care of people, be more charitable. But that's just not realistic. And the reason why this story is important is because it parallels the real world where we're living in the situation where we have a ton of Ebenezer Scrooges, more so than ever before in human history. And many people are convinced that if these Ebenezer Scrooges, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Warren Buffett are just more charitable than things will be better, humanity can be saved. For example, Jeff Bezos recently announced that he'd be giving away most of his wealth to fight climate change. Maybe he was visited by the three ghosts. Patagonia's billionaire owner, Yvonne Shenard, made a similar announcement before Bezos that he'd give away the company to save the world. Bill Gates also announced his plan to give away all of his wealth. You see, the Ebenezer Scrooges of the world can actually save humanity, except that's bullshit. That's not actually true. All of these headlines are nothing more than PR for these billionaires. But most importantly, what they're doing is a deliberate scheme to avoid paying taxes. They form their own charities and then donate to themselves in essence with no real mechanisms for accountability, no democratic control, and it's all deceitful. But even if these billionaires weren't just doing this for PR or to avoid taxes, still billionaire charity would not solve the world's issues. In a 2020 article for The Guardian, I think that Simon Jenkins put it best. That is why I find uncomfortable. The idea of a horde of surplus cash secured by dodging taxation, regulation and monopoly control becoming the private exchequer of a tiny group of very rich to distribute at whim. This is not a matter of politics, but of constitutional propriety. In a democracy, the distribution of spare resources should be for elected governments. Taxes should be raised from all for the good of all to be allocated through democratic consent. That is how decent societies operate, not by vaguely thinking about what feels good from the comfort of a Californian beach or a yacht more than Monaco. And that's exactly it. We shouldn't have to cross our fingers and hope or beg these billionaires to be more charitable, to engage in philanthropy. We shouldn't hope that they get visited by the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future in order to get them to stop being greedy assholes. We force them to do that by taxing them, by taking the wealth that they stole from their employees to reach that billionaire status and actually spreading it around by the government, not by hoping that they'll do it willingly because odds are they're not going to do it willingly. They say that they're doing it, but in actuality, they're not doing it. So back to Steven Crowder. No, it is not the case that Ebenezer Scrooge is the story of a liberal becoming a conservative unit with the opposite is true. He doesn't want to admit that his political views more closely align with Ebenezer Scrooge before he was visited by the three ghosts. But he's claiming that Ebenezer is a conservative because he was portrayed as a hero to the people he helped. And Crowder wants you to think that conservatives are also heroes just like Scrooge at the end of a Christmas Carol, but they're not. They're villains in the story and they're also villains in real life. They refused to renew the child tax credit and free school lunch program this year. But if he actually wanted to spin this story as a positive for conservatives, he could have highlighted its pro capitalist message and claimed that the biggest capitalists are actually the world's greatest heroes. But that's a bit too sophisticated of an analysis for a guy with the brain the size of a walnut.