Tom the Dancing Bug by Ruben Bolling for August 03, 2012

The Ryan Plan in a nutshell – with the emphasis on NUTshell !

And then Goldman Sachs will own the ocean, the beach, and the trees. Just as Nature intended.

The Invisible Hand of Capitalism.

Everyone is going to have to learn how to starve and die on a little less.

Ruling out austerity when times are bad might make sense. But we ruled out austerity when times were good, in order to avoid bad times. This formula sounds like an unsustainable economy.

The Left always imagines that capitalism is doomed to fail so government must take over. Why is it they can envision their fairy-tale egalitarian future society but they can’t understand how a free economy deals with a constantly changing reality? Their purposeful misunderstanding of economics is as shallow as the “economy” in this cartoon.

The Right knows that reality is an illusion, and that on some ineffable level, trickle-down economics totally works, despite the evidence of our lying eyes.

I sent this to some friends yesterday – our ongoing crisis in a snapshot. Well done, Ruben, thanks.

It’s not the religious nuts that worry me, it’s the crony “capitalists” who funnel government funds into failing businesses that “are too big to fail.” Let the damned things fail, that’s true capitalism.

If only life were that simple, then this strip would’ve made sense.

Where’s Wall St. to rip everyone off?

Has anyone noticed that austerity – itself a banker’s idea – never applies to the people ordering others to practice it?

If we’re going to have less government, let’s start by getting rid of the Nixon-started war on drugs, which has cost a trillion dollars and counting, and failed completely. Then we can move on to stopping corperate welfare.

Well, it appears there are no women on the island. That may be the problem. Certainly it will be the ultimate problem with the island’s population.

Thinking in absolutes can be scary whether it comes from the Left or the Right. The wide eyed idealists on the Right refuse to recognize that big business can distort free markets as much as government can. The crazies on the Left don’t seem to be aware that government is in business for itself, not for the people. Moderation in all things.

Not everyone on the Left or the Right is a problem… in fact, I would say that both viewpoints are necessary in their own way. Those who live in their own private fantasy without checking in with reality now and then are a problem and they are most likely the crazies you refer to. It’s true that, if you are attached to one side you will find it easier to see the faults in the other than in your own. If you identify with the Left you will probably see the Right as being dominated by the crazies. Those who are attached to the Right see the Left as dominated by crazies. Both will be right just often enough that they will find it unnecessary to examine their assumptions.

If I may qualify that comment… There is some truth in what you say. The unregulated capitalism of the laissez faire era demonstrated that lack of regulation does not lead to free markets… that, in fact, it tends to lead to trusts that suppress the freedom of the markets and of the individual. There are, however, specific markets that regulate themselves. They are characterized by being highly splintered… composed of thousands of tiny, expendable players… Smith’s ‘invisible hand’ was present in small corner stores across the UK in the era before the advent of chain stores and many would view this environment as being the ultimate example of capitalism at work.

Wow! The creators of this comic-strip are demonstrating a complete IGNORANCE of how economics work. There are so many fallacies in this cartoon, that I don’t even know where to begin.