Breaking! Area goof, CBC personality, and disingenuous charitable gift-giver Kevin O’Leary was zapped into a hi-tech CNBC news scroll zone yesterday to bark at journalist Jesse Myerson.
Myerson is the author of Five Economic Reforms Millennials Should Be Fighting For, a recent Rolling Stone piece that dares to reengage disenfranchised twenty-aughts with their own economic reality. While peppered with cutesy-hip backward-capisms like “unemployment blows” and “because capitalism, is why,” Myerson’s piece otherwise advocates for sensible stuff like job guarantees and a land-value tax, as well as moderately more radical stuff like collective ownership and (everyone’s new favourite) universal basic income.
Who better to deflate the ambitions of a young-ish economist than Kevin O’Leary? He’s apparently desperately trying to expand his brand stateside on CNBC’s Shark Tank, which is basically the US Dragon’s Den. Any hint of socialism being the blood in O’Leary’s…er…shark tank, he cut loose on Myerson. (Though, to his minimal credit, it was slightly less embarrassing than the time he got schooled by Chris Hedges, or the time he accidentally played into the tiny hands of anti-GMO teenager Rachel Parent.)
“They tried this experiment once before,” O’Leary froths. “It was called the Soviet Union and it ended very, very badly. You can Google it if you don’t believe me. Everyone ended up down by the river eating government cheese.”
Ah yes, the Soviet Union! That bastion of uncorrupted collectivism, that unproblematic paradigm of Marxian utopia. Leave it O’Leary to refer to classic dad logic in the face of actual argumentation. He probably also says stuff like, “Gee, you know Hitler was a vegetarian!” Clown.
O’Leary also spent a lot of time outlining why he believes that education is a privilege, not a right. “If you want to spend seven years getting a philosophy degree,” he blah-blah-blahed, “and you want to borrow than me and then sit on Wall Street complaining, you deserve to go to debtors prison because you know with certainty you’re not going to get a job!”
The wrinkle? Myerson’s article makes no mention of education or school debt. O’Leary just hears “millenials” and then steam blasts out of his ears as he imagines a snaking breadline of philosophy and anthropology majors cued up to eat his own personal money.
Luckily, Myerson called O’Leary on his ignorance of the issues actually being debated, in a well-meaning to attempt to embarrass Canada’s favourite unembarrassable clown.
Yikes, what a clown, eh? Here some pictures of Kevin O’Leary as a clown.
Here’s his clown nose:
And heeeeere’s some clown hair, for this clown:
