I’ll be honest, I had never heard of Mr. Beast about 6 months ago. I still don’t know anything about him except that he generates a lot of content, and has been continuously for a long time.
I’ve heard a lot of commentary on the “controversy” surrounding his recent video where he paid for 1,000 people to get cataract surgery in 3 weeks. Apparently it set off some popular socialists, which set off the popular capitalists.
What I haven’t heard yet, though, is a capitalist take that genuinely contends with the socialist critique.
The socialists, at least the ones I heard, were not criticizing Mr. Beast. They were criticizing the fact that an incredibly basic $10,000 surgery is all that stands between thousands of people and the ability to see, yet “the system,” which is able to allocate millions of dollars toward yachts and golf courses for millionaires, has not been organized to provide vision to them. And they are criticizing the fact that capitalism’s “solution” to that problem is to make a spectacle of the people who are suffering so that the already rich capitalist can make more money off of it.
And therein lies the biggest problem with socialism. What Mr. Beast created was nothing short of a miracle. In our real world system — flawed, short-sighted, materialistic, and inefficient as it is — Mr. Beast built a way for 1,000 people to get a $10,000 surgery and have it literally pay for itself. And the socialists are so obsessed with a hypothetical system that will hypothetically do more good that they go out of their way to criticize a real life system that already has done real life good.
And each of those socialists now has the opportunity to make their own video helping real people, and potentially have that video pay for itself too, but they won’t. Because these socialists don’t understand that the world is made better not all at once, when the right system is finally put into place, but one good deed, one act of generosity, one life-improving surgery at a time.
