Capitalist free markets debunk a lot of myths, urban legends and conspiracy theories.
Enduring myths, urban legends and conspiracy theories have many flaws in common.
There is always a lack of verifiable evidence, and a resistance to disconfirmation.
These stories often assume a level of competence in government covert operations that the same governments never display in any visible public services.
They often attribute motives and actions to an entire mainstream establishment, in which every part, from politicians to the media to academia to the military, conspires together to keep ordinary ‘sheeple’ (but not our valiant online truth-seeker!) in the dark.
They gloss over the exceptional improbability that thousands or millions of people could collectively keep a secret.
They weave simplistic explanations for complex events, or suppose that a complicated set of circumstances and coincidences can only be explained by the machinations of a master planner operating in the shadows.
Each of these offers a vector to attack the false belief, but all of these suffer from the bullshit asymmetry principle, a phrase coined by Italian programmer Alberto Brandolini in 2013, which states: ‘The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.’
Economic heuristic
I’d like to propose a far simpler heuristic.
Just ask whether a particular version of events makes economic sense, or why, if a particular myth is true, nobody is making tons of money marketing the hell out of it.
Classical liberalism provides a rich tradition of viewing economics as a means not of predicting, but explaining, human behaviour.
Ludwig von Mises was perhaps the most clear thinker about it, entitling his magnum opus on economics Human Action (available for free here). But many other writers, from, say, Ricardo and Bastiat, to Menger, von Böhm-Bawerk, and Hayek, have also contributed.
Let’s subject a few popular, but also some more recent, folk beliefs to some basic heuristics of economic behaviour analysis.
We’ll start with one that’s close to home.
Number plate hijackers
A few days ago, the following message did the rounds on our local WhatsApp groups:
Number Plate Robbery: There is a new number plate hijacking trend. Hi-jackers follow you to a parking lot, after you leave your vehicle, they remove your number plate and wait. When u come back and drive off, they follow you. They then overtake you, displaying your number plate out of their window as if you just lost it and they want to give it back to you.
When you stop to get your number plate back, guns come out and they take the car. Maybe even take you and your car. It’s a very well-rehearsed and organised plan and everything happens very quickly. Other motorists may not be aware of what is happening as you stopped the car yourself. Pls alert others to this danger!!! Don’t keep this news. Spread it.
Now, we could subject this to several bullshit detector rules, such as that if it contains multiple exclamation marks or says to send it on, it’s guaranteed to be bullshit.
Or the factual correctness check: in South Africa, number plates are no longer screwed on, but riveted on, exactly to prevent crooks from easily nabbing them.
But the better question is, ‘Why? Why would car hijackers go to such lengths to hijack you?’
Snopes, the urban legend fact-checking site, reported on this myth seven years ago, noting that it did originate in South Africa (which explains the spelling of ‘organised’).
Here is the economic reasoning it offered:
Time and again, crime warnings of the sort appear with no explanation as to why the robber would engage in so many time-consuming, risky, and questionably useful actions just to effect an outcome identical to the one he or she would encounter by simply carjacking under normal circumstances. No part of the scheme benefits the criminal actor in it, and most of the steps if anything expose thieves to greater risk of getting caught (a smart robber would worry about CCTV, observant bystanders, and retail security patrols). A standard carjacking scenario is almost universally a crime of opportunity where the thief controls the setting, the timing, their relative inconspicuousness, and has the upper hand of sudden movement. In the proposed scheme, the thief risks getting caught stealing the tags, having the driver move to an even less ideal location for the commission of the crime (or having the time to reconsider the tag thief’s motives), or being thwarted altogether by the driver noticing that their license plate[s] are quite obviously missing.
That’s what gave me the idea to apply such logic to other conspiracies or myths.
Depopulation
Take the Bill Gates ‘depopulation agenda’. According to the myth, Gates supports vaccination programmes because vaccines secretly sterilise people, and this serves his supposed agenda to reduce the world’s population in the interests of mitigating climate change.
It is true that Gates has in the past expressed concerns about over-population, and once said that better health care and improved access to vaccines could reduce the population by 10% or 15%.
The confusion is made worse by the fact that the word ‘fertility’ in population demographics, meaning the number of children women have, is not the same as the term ‘fertility’ in the medical sense, meaning whether or not a woman can have children.
What he meant, however, was that people living in healthier societies with lower child mortality choose to have fewer children, which is exactly what has happened in the developed world.
There’s nothing sinister going on here. Health leads to development which leads to lower population growth.
One has to ask, however, whether if the objective of Gates-supported vaccination programmes is to sterilise and/or kill people, couldn’t that objective be achieved with a little less effort, and perhaps a little less visibility?
After all, sitting at the head of a global vaccination programme, actually talking about reducing population, is a pretty exposed position for a would-be mass murderer.
It is also pretty simple to analyse a vaccine to determine whether it will cause harm. Failing that, it is simple to show statistical evidence among the vaccinated populations in order to see whether it has the effects claimed by the conspiracy theory.
But most importantly, there are surely better, less detectable, less expensive, and more efficient ways to poison people?
Like doping their drinking water? Oh wait, that’s what the fluoride is for.
But then, why do you need vaccines on top of the fluoride? And what are chemtrails for?
Chemtrails
Yeah, that’s another one. Chemtrails – the conspiracy theorists’ name for condensation trails (contrails) that jet airliners sometimes produce – supposedly mist us all with drugs to make us more docile, or more sterile, or chronically ill to make the medical industry tons of money, or some such reason.
But again, if you’re going to poison people, why put the poison at 30,000 feet, where it might never reach the ground, and along flight paths that tend to fly over vast uninhabited spaces where the chemtrails will be entirely ineffective?
Why not just create massive atomisers in secret locations near population centres, to spray the poison into the air near ground level? That would be a much more effective way to spread an airborne drug or poison than getting thousands of airlines with millions of technicians to buy into your spray-the-sheeple plot.
Even then, you couldn’t control the dose very well, so whether you actually meet your objective remains a pretty hit-or-miss affair.
(I tried to research other simple and cost-effective ways of poisoning a large population en masse, but the internet refused to help and now I’m probably on a terror watchlist.)
Elvis Presley
How about Elvis. Elvis didn’t die in 1977, they say. He still lives among us. He’s alive!
If he is, he’d be 88 now, which strikes me as an unlikely age for someone with his lifestyle, which involved a pharmacy’s worth of prescription drugs, plus obesity and diabetes – although as long as Keith Richards is alive, I guess anything is possible.
Maybe he died sometime after 1977, in hiding or witness protection, or whatever the conspiracists believe.
Between 1977 and his actual death, then, we’d have had to believe that Elvis considered himself rich enough to never have to sing for his supper again.
We need to believe that no media house hungry for more eyeballs and more slavering clicks would have funded the biggest manhunt in media history to discover his true whereabouts, or even just credibly debunk his death.
We need to believe that not a single rogue celeb-hunting paparazzo with Pulitzer ambitions managed to track him down to a remote tropical island to earn their own lottery-sized payday.
If Elvis were alive, the free market would have found him.
Moon landings
Also, the moon landings were staged, on a movie lot in Arizona.
This conspiracy dates back to a pamphlet published in 1976 by Bill Kaysing, who was peripherally, tenuously, involved in the Saturn V rocket motor design programme.
Though he did not have any science or engineering qualifications, he claimed the US did not have the technical expertise to land men on the moon. He claimed that the Apollo 1 fire and the Challenger explosion in 1986 were efforts to cover up the hoax by killing astronauts who supposedly were on the brink of spilling the beans.
Kaysing also believed that an acronym soup of federal agencies were conspiring to ‘brainwash the public, poison their food, and control the media’.
Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that the US government was willing, after having promised to go to the moon and having been beaten to space by the USSR, to spend billions to fake their space race coup.
Once again, we’d need the collusion of hundreds of thousands of people, only one of whom, Kaysing, was willing to break ranks.
Much more telling, however, is the fact that the Soviet Union went along with the claims of the Americans. If there was anyone with a motive to debunk the moon landings, it would have been the communists, whose rivalry with the international bourgeoisie was intense.
Aliens and alien technology
The case of whether or not government agents secretly have access to extraterrestrial engineering is even simpler.
(Actually, we do have Alien Technology, but that is, unfortunately, all too terrestrial.)
Imagine the immense fortunes that could be made by commercialising alien materials and engineering secrets.
I suppose one might argue that Teflon was alien, that VR headsets are alien, or that Steve Jobs learned everything he knew at Area 51, but none of those hold up to scrutiny.
If travelling shows with fake aliens are a profitable scam for frauds and hucksters, imagine the fame and fortune that awaits the discoverer of real alien remains!
Imagine the bribes that anyone who truly believed in secret alien bodies would pay to security guards and janitors to gain access to the real thing!
The fact that we have yet to see verified alien remains at the Smithsonian is a market inefficiency that is so improbable as to be impossible. The free market doesn’t tolerate such inefficiency for long.
If they were real, someone, somewhere, would have exploited aliens or alien technology to make their fortune a long time ago.
Crypto-zoology
Same goes for bigfoot, or the yeti, or the Loch Ness monster, or whatever cryptid creature myth you prefer.
If they were real, the free market would not permit them to remain hidden for so long. If James Cameron can dive to Challenger Deep, and tourists can fly to space, someone, somewhere would have found evidence of these monsters by now, and made their fortune or career on the back of it. The fact that nobody has done so is very strong evidence that they do not exist.
Space lasers
The latest conspiracy is that the Maui wildfires in Hawaii, that killed 97 people, were in fact started deliberately by arsonists… using space lasers.
It’s all to do with elite land grabs, apparently. And Jews. An actual Congress Critter, Marjorie Taylor Green, of the certifiably insane and grossly offensive wing of the Republican Party, first proposed Jewish space lasers as being behind the California wildfires in 2018.
Now, the internet is drowning in doctored images of exploding transformers, oil refinery fires, rocket launches, or pictures that show light pillars, to substantiate the claim that someone started the Maui wildfires using lasers from space.
But think about it.
Laser weapons, a subclass of directed energy weapons, do exist. However, they are limited to terrestrial devices, because they are bulky and need an enormous electricity supply.
There are naturally occurring space lasers billions of light-years away, but the state of the art in human-built space lasers is to use them for high-speed communication or laser altimetry.
These lasers are nowhere near powerful enough to be used as weapons, as one might imagine, since they’re on satellites that simply don’t have a ton of energy available to beam back to Earth.
If it were possible to launch or build a laser in space powerful enough to start a fire on Earth, even a sociopath with no moral compass, like Elon Musk, would have used it not for starting fires, but to build a solar energy collector that could beam carbon-free energy back to Earth.
You don’t make money burning stuff down. You make money by creating something people want to buy.
And if you’re really going to burn stuff down, you’d probably want to use a cigarette lighter, and not a multi-billion dollar space laser.
Free market economic reasoning is all you need to debunk the space laser wildfire nonsense.
And that goes for almost any other myth, legend or conspiracy theory. Just ask what would happen in a free market, if it were true.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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