Thou hast angered the Economy
by Benjamin on August 26, 2009
Back in March the boys at South Park wrote an episode on the economy which is just fantastic. “You have brought the economy’s vengeance upon yourself!” Announces the father, and ye must repent, by spending less!
In that we have the Paradox of Thrift, and so enter the son, ‘a young jew’, preaching that we must spend more, not less. The economy is not some vengeful omnipotent being but is based on faith:
The full episode is great fun, and you can watch it (legally) in installments here [1, 2, 3]. But one last thing has to be mentioned. In dealing with the credit crunch, Stan – another boy – tries to return a blender bought on credit, eventually ending up at the US Treasury who owns the bad debt. The Treasury agrees to refund him, and goes off to value the blender… This is beautiful:
It reminds me of the Treasury spokes-person, who on the 23 September 2008 explained where they had gotten the $700 billion initial bail-out figure from: “It’s not based on any particular data point, we just wanted to choose a really large number.” Lovely.
Tags: Credit Crunch, Economics, Economy, Funny, Paradox of Thrift, recession, South Park
Ben — This is fantastic! Great find. Cheers, r
lol find?
Admittedly, this is a superb example (even in relative terms), however almost every episode of south park delivers sharply hilarious social commentary like this.