I was at a dinner party recently where the topic of conversation switched to how everyone at the table uses YouTube to learn how to do various house or automotive DIY projects. It was quite amazing to hear all the various examples of projects that everyone had undertaken using nothing but YouTube as their teacher.
It got me thinking about how YouTube ended up with such a wide breadth of videos. For instance, lets say that you want to replace the brake pads on your car on your own. You’d save hundreds of dollars vs going to an automotive shop. YouTube not only has brake pad instructional videos. They have them for any commonly sold car. Chances are that you could find a video that will tell you exactly every nut or bolt that you need to touch. Now that is what I call excellent service.
So what drives such a huge supply of videos on every subject imaginable? Self-Interest. All the YouTube creators are trying to make videos that will stand out from the crowd. So if there are already videos on doing brake pads for Honda Accords or BMW 3-Series cars, they look for a niche that hasn’t been covered yet. Are there no Hyundai videos yet? Great! Let’s do some Hyundai videos!
Everyone is motivated to serve their fellow man by self-interest. And the higher quality work you do, the more views you get. It’s a beautiful system that illustrates how capitalism as a whole is supposed to work.
The opposite of capitalism is state-mandated communism. In the communist model, the government could realize that there should be a database of instructional videos for the good of the people. So maybe they enact a law that says everyone needs to contribute one video per year to the database in order to use it. The videos would probably be low quality and they would be the bare minimum to meet the requirements. People would not be motivated by self-interest but by government compulsion. Big difference.
Capitalism is all about serving your fellow man and money is the measure of how much service you’ve rendered. It’s a beautiful system that doesn’t deserve most of the arrows shot at it by critics. Here is a video which I try to post once per year on my blog by one of my all time favorite intellectuals, the late Walter Williams.
So what drives such a huge supply of videos on every subject imaginable? Self-Interest. All the YouTube creators are trying to make videos that will stand out from the crowd. So if there are already videos on doing brake pads for Honda Accords or BMW 3-Series cars, they look for a niche that hasn’t been covered yet. Are there no Hyundai videos yet? Great! Let’s do some Hyundai videos!
Everyone is motivated to serve their fellow man by self-interest. And the higher quality work you do, the more views you get. It’s a beautiful system that illustrates how capitalism as a whole is supposed to work.
The opposite of capitalism is state-mandated communism. In the communist model, the government could realize that there should be a database of instructional videos for the good of the people. So maybe they enact a law that says everyone needs to contribute one video per year to the database in order to use it. The videos would probably be low quality and they would be the bare minimum to meet the requirements. People would not be motivated by self-interest but by government compulsion. Big difference.
Capitalism is all about serving your fellow man and money is the measure of how much service you’ve rendered. It’s a beautiful system that doesn’t deserve most of the arrows shot at it by critics. Here is a video which I try to post once per year on my blog by one of my all time favorite intellectuals, the late Walter Williams.
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