,
7 tweets,
2 min read
Read on Twitter
Ben Shapiro's infamous "If climate change is real, people who live on the coast will just sell their houses." gaffe is an example of what I mean when I talk about people operating on the level of an RPG economy.
In a lot of video games where you can buy and sell things -- most of them -- transactions are only really simulated from one side. Nothing happens to the money you spend, it's just deducted from your total and gone. Nothing happens to the things you sell, they're just gone.
And it doesn't matter if there is or could be a market for something; if it has a value, that value is constant, and you can sell it. Possibly to anyone, anywhere, who buys and sells.
Ben's not thinking about who's going to buy the literally underwater houses (*the Horse from Horsin' Around voice* "I've heard of sub-marine mortgage rates, but this is ridiculous!"), because as far as he knows, he's not talking about buying. He's talking about selling, right?
In this one regard, Hair Furor's level of understanding of the world exceeds his peers among the great conservative thinkers of the day, insofar as he understands a transaction has two sides... a winner, and a loser, in his estimation.
But conservatism manages to function at ever and ever more increasing remove from reality by compartmentalizing the whole world, treating each and every thing as an isolated incident in a vacuum, unaffected by and not affecting in turn anything else.
And this is how it is possible for Ben Shapiro to believe we could all get well-paying jobs. No one *needs* to do those jobs that are currently paying below-subsistence wages. We could ALL run Daily Wires of our own just like him if we just did all the hard work he's sure he did.
