 Once upon a time on this series I described Wilson Fisk as the best villain in the Marvel cinematic universe. In the years since We've seen some other dastardly bad guys on screen. Cottonmouth and Black Mariah, Purple Man, Killmonger, Hela, the Ebony Maw, Thanos. All good. But honestly, I stand by what I said back then. I still think Wilson Fisk is the best of them because out of all the villains in the MCU He's the one I think is the most believable. I covered why at length in another video But there still haven't been too many other villains who have anywhere near as strong a connection to a real world counterpart Or who have motivations that aren't just some variant of I'm a lunatic and want to destroy the world However, there is one other antagonist that comes close the vulture Although the setup for his character doesn't get a whole season on Netflix the opening scenes of Spider-Man homecoming give Adrian Toombs a clear and dare I say even relatable reason to turn to a life of crime cronies With that in mind hit that subscribe button ring that bell icon and welcome to out of frame Adrian Tooms is like a lot of business owners around the world He worked hard to build a successful company so that he could support his family and create value for other people at the same time In the aftermath of the Avengers battle for New York against a Chitauri alien invasion He sees an opportunity to sell his company services cleaning up the wreckage of the city and salvaging materials and technology from the weapons and vehicles left behind He invests hundreds of thousands of dollars in new trucks warehouse space Capital machinery and hiring new employees He goes through what he understands to be the proper channels and gets approval from City Hall to begin working But at the very moment it looks like his company will begin to profit a federal government official shows up and strips Everything away from him in accordance with executive order 396 be all post-battle cleanup operations are now under our jurisdiction To make matters worse the government doesn't prevent Everyone from potentially profiting from the cleanup and salvage efforts in New York It just brings them under the auspices of a new public-private partnership with stark industries And to add insult to injury one of the bureaucrats who comes in to seize command of the scene takes a cheap shot at Adrian When he has the gall to protest the injustice, maybe next time don't over extend yourself. He's right. I overextended myself It's hard not to empathize with Adrian's situation Imagine how you'd feel if you invested all your money and countless hours of your time working on a project With the expectation that it would help you generate a good income for your employees your wife daughter and yourself Only to have someone in power come in and tell you that not only did you waste all your time? Money and effort planning something that they won't actually allow you to do They also have no obligation to even compensate you for your losses. I'm sorry, sir. There's nothing I can do You'd probably feel like you weren't being treated fairly You might rightly feel like a victim Now just to be clear I'm not saying that this justifies Adrian's choice to become a supervillain armed with a high-powered flying suit and Chitauri weapons But it does make it a lot easier to understand why he turns that direction. You don't understand how the world works Yeah, but I understand that selling weapons to criminals is wrong. How do you think your buddy Stark paid for that tower or any of his little toys? Those people Pete those people up there the rich and the powerful. They do whatever they want guys like us You me Don't care about us We build their roads and we fight all their wars and everything. They don't care about us We have to pick up after and we have to eat their table scraps Adrian is hardly alone In reality, these kinds of things happen all the time Especially in societies where government has a lot of power over people's economic activities There's a strong correlation between cronyism and corruption and a lack of economic freedom When governments have the power to select which companies are allowed to do which kinds of work and which aren't The people who invariably win are the individuals and businesses who are well connected and or well liked by the political class The losers are well People like the vulture with the government picking which companies would be allowed to clean up the city and without sufficient political connections Adrian's entrepreneurial dream never really stood a chance on the other hand as a weapons manufacturer for the US Government for the better part of a century now run by one of the most prominent super heroes in the world Stark industries didn't really have that problem and Stark isn't the only big player in the MCU Other companies like Roxanne or Hammer Industries are also shown to have direct ties to the government And even some of the government officials themselves are clearly corrupt We see this kind of cronyism in real life all over the world Well connected people get all kinds of special privileges and protections They get regulations and rules written in their favor. They get subsidies and special tax breaks They get government contracts worth billions of dollars and these benefits create major Incentives for people to try to influence government so that it works in their favor at the expense of their competitors and opposition You can see this in the United States in any industry where the government plays a major role in financing and regulation Take the agriculture sector for example according to open secrets since 1998 the farm lobby which includes various state Farm Bureau's co-ops unions and trade Associations as well as major individual companies like Archer Daniels Midland Merck John Deere and even Pepsi Have spent an average of over $116 million a year Influencing politicians in both parties now that probably sounds like a lot But the US government pays out over two hundred times that amount around $25 billion a year in cash subsidies to farmers the government also severely restrict certain kinds of agricultural Imports and limits competition in order to protect favored us producers Point is the return on investment is enormous Of course, I can see some of the comments already Some of you will say that this is a good thing. Don't we want to protect American farmers to this I would say that while we absolutely do want to create an environment with a level playing field where farmers can thrive That's not actually what these subsidies are doing According to a recent Heritage Foundation report it is almost never the struggling small family farms who benefit from these policies Instead it is commercial farms that account for just ten point one percent of all farms But who receive seventy three percent of commodity payments and eighty three percent of crop insurance indemnities That is it's the biggest most well connected companies getting billions of dollars from US taxpayers Meanwhile, the smaller farms get squashed and we end up with less competition lower quality and higher food prices The subsidies benefit huge corporations at the expense of everyone else The same thing happens in health care energy education Aerospace and defense Infrastructure and pretty much every other sector of the economy that's heavily controlled or paid for by the government And yes, I can imagine even more of your comments telling me that this is all the fault of greedy Corporations and not well-meaning government officials But as easy as it usually is to blame corporations for lobbying and influencing politicians The reality is that they only do this because the government has the power to pick winners and losers That power creates the incentive to influence government not so much the other way around We know this in part because the more power governments have over their economies The worst the lobbying cronyism and corruption gets and the US is actually one of the least corrupt countries on this basis In many other parts of the world people rely on the outright bribery of public officials in order to conduct any sort of business at all Modern socialist and communist countries throughout history like the USSR, China, India, Pakistan, Cuba, Venezuela, Congo, Mozambique, Somalia, East Germany, North Korea, and on and on Were and are notorious for their astoundingly high levels of corruption By contrast when governments have less power over the economy the incentive to bribe, lobby, or use the state to gain Subsidies and special privileges actually goes away This is true when we compare whole economies country by country But it's also true when we look industry to industry For example, the US government has little involvement in the fashion and apparel industry The market for clothing is about as free as it gets open to any and all competition from pretty much anywhere in the world Fashion designs can't even be patented Anybody can start a business and sell just about whatever they want. It's also big business Almost three hundred billion dollars a year in the US alone Surely we all agree that there's no shortage of greedy CEOs in the fashion world And yet in 2018 the US Fashion Industry Association spent just $40,000 on lobbying. It's worth asking. Why don't they spend more? But what good would spending more on lobbying even do? US politicians probably aren't going to give billions of dollars in subsidies to Tom Ford and Everyone knows that so instead of blowing tons of money trying to get government favors Tom Ford spends his time and resources designing better clothes and creating better marketing campaigns And that brings us back to the vulture Adrian Toomes could have taken his setback as an opportunity to find other ways of creating value with the resources at his disposal He could have shifted his operation to cleaning up private commercial and residential buildings destroyed in the attack He could have reverted to engaging in a more traditional salvage operation Reclaiming human building materials on behalf of construction companies desperate for resources But he didn't do that Instead he used the fact that he was the victim of an unfair system To justify his decision to steal technology and sell alien weapons to criminals Knowing they would go out and hurt innocent people That's a real shame But for me, this makes his character even more believable Unfair cronyism and corruption doesn't just create economic victims It also chips away at people's belief in the rule of law as a concept over time When people think that their economy is rigged when they believe that the only way to succeed is to know the right politicians When they are certain the rules are unfair They eventually quit caring about the rules altogether and that is how we end up with villains like the vulture If we want a world where we don't have to deal with people like that We need to go back to the root of the problem If we want to reduce cronyism and corruption The government cannot have the power to pick winners and losers and the rules have to apply equally to everyone In short, if we want a world where people spend their time trying to create value and improve each other's lives Instead of spending their time trying to get political favors. We need free markets Hey everybody, thanks for watching this episode of out of frame If you have an idea for a video you'd like to see me make in the future Or you want to fight me about the idea of economic freedom as the antidote to corruption Let me know what you think in the comments If you like this series in general Please help us avoid having to get more clickbaity in response to YouTube's new algorithm changes by Smashing those like and subscribe buttons and ringing the bell icon so you see our content first in your feed And as always don't forget to check us out as at fee online on YouTube Facebook Twitter and Instagram See you next time