Well in the first few minutes before it became too insulting to my intelligence to watch I counted these things:
1. A baffling comparison to the GDP of Europe in 1870. (wut)
2. The frequently used and highly dishonest statement that antipoverty programs haven't reduced poverty. People who try to say this use the federal poverty statistic that doesn't count transfers. That means they count all the costs of antipoverty programs and count none of the benefits. This is dishonest.
3. A ridiculous comparison of government debt to personal debt. Why that comparison is nonsensical has been gone over many times here.
4. The laughably wrong statement that estate taxes wouldn't produce any additional revenue. (that one failed a basic logic test)
These are arguments made by someone who either doesn't understand the numbers he's talking about or he's being deliberately dishonest. It's all the more amusing that he tries to insult the intelligence of other people on several occasions, considering the embarrassing mistakes he's made. And hell, there's still another ~45 minutes or so of this nonsense.
He seems to be a relatively entertaining speaker, which maybe explains why people listen to this pants-on-head babbling nonsense?
If I can add to your criticism, it would only be in response to people who say "I'm a laissez-faire capitalist" or "a Libertarian" that it's just more of people buying into a single ideology and belief system. It almost seems a paradox, but ideologues are "utopians" in a broad sense. This is no compliment: it means that adherents refuse to meet the world the way it is, have a vision of the way it ought to be, and might even feel inclined to "get there" all at once without incremental change.
We've lived in "mixed economy" since the 1930s. If there are "transfers," they aren't "pure public goods" and enhance the perception of those who don't directly benefit that someone is exclusively benefiting at their expense. It follows Ayn Rand's delusional idea that "altruism" is bad, selfishness is good, and that I don't sleep better at night knowing that kids on the other side of town are also going to sleep on a full stomach.
There is another abstraction which I entertain, only because it seems to explain something: Hegelian dialectic -- thesis, antithesis -- synthesis.
After WWII, part of the US economy adopted aspects of "corporatism' through creation of the National Security State. This is a type of fascism. At the same time and during the Cold War, the "mixed economy" expanded with socialistic or collective-good responses, justified to strengthen society in the $6 Trillion expenditure defense build-up and occasional misadventures. We got the national highway system, NDEA student loans, massive infusions of federal cash into state economies. And overall -- human progress and much prosperity.
The ideologues on the Right use "Socialism" as an epithet, ignoring that it only offers a partial tool-box available to "common-sense."
They also believe Oswald was a "real communist." And that old canard was the entire point of it.
Finally, there are two myths they promote. "If we have most of the wealth, we have the most to lose, and therefore we have a greater right to govern."
And there's the myth that certain industries an majority stockholders (tycoons) "earned every penny" with the implications of having every right to do with it as they please.
Maybe if you grow potatoes or run an ice-cream parlor, you "earned every bit of it." But if your returns are guaranteed because everyone else "needs" what you have and you're only one of a few providers, your property-rights argument is corrupt.
In response to the first myth -- called it a "straw-man" if you wish -- Wealth begets income and wealth with less or no human effort. Prudent management of wealth alleviates short-term losses; steak is always on the table; the $10 million estate mortgage will be paid; you only defer adding another Lamborghini to your collection until better times.
The owner of a four-digit bank account can actually see much greater risk and uncertainty. The owner of a four-digit bank account cannot afford to make mistakes like "The Great Silver Bubble" of the Hunt brothers.
Eliminating the Estate Tax is only as much of an "American" idea as it is a resurrection of pre-Revolution Tory privilege.
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