Everything Wrong With Prager U's "The Progressive Income Tax: A Tale of Three Brothers," Part I

For those of you who don't know- in other words, you hit "Skip Ad" as soon as possible when you saw these ubiquitious valentines to Libertarianism pop up- Dennis Prager is a right-wing talk show host who, when not bashing intellectualism and sneering at the idea that a college education is of any actual value, pretends to be a university professor who knows how to use Prexi on YouTube.  When he isn't blathering nonsense into a microphone, he's blathering nonsense along with whizzing graphics and infantile cartoon characters using equally infantile straw man arguments against Socialism, Atheism, and...well, that's about it, actually.

These stupid chapters all fall under the banner of "Prager U," which is even less of a university than Trump University and even less of a learning opportunity than Prager is a teacher.  I guess this is Prager's "answer" to the "wasted money" represented by college- "see, I'm just a jackass radio yakker and I know more stuff than your elitist university professors, you whiny know-it-all millenials.  Check this out, my intern did the graphics!"

Anyway, I didn't want to spend this entire blog post explaining and bashing the concept of Prager U, which is nothing more than Dennis Prager's ego showing up again and again to interrupt my viewing.  I wanted to focus on this particular chapter, in which Prager condescendingly tries to "explain" to us why the concept of "class" is bad and wrong and that if we don't have money it's because we're just lazy and made bad choices like deciding not to work ourselves to death and actually raise our kids and find value in things other than money.

I realized about two minutes in that this was going to take some time, and I'd have to break it up into episodes to avoid this post being several pages long.  So I hope you don't mind that this looks more like a long-winded project than the usual "I hate this Commerical here's why" schtick.  My intention is to look at key points in Prager's little "you make choices and live with them you whiny schmucks" rant and give my own interpretation of what is going on.  When I'm done, I'll post the entire thing on successive days.   Ok, here we go with the opening:

Tom, Dick and Harry Class are triplets who were all raised in the same home with the same family- ok, we get it, Prager is going to show that they all had exactly the same advantages, so we can't blame or credit environment.  This is pounded into us early on; Prager is very concerned we are going to notice something "special" about one of the Class brothers right away.  Nope.  Same skills, Same IQ, "same opportunities."  They are basically clones following the same script.  Fine.

Each of the brothers got married and had two children.  They were all carpenters making $25 per hour.  And it's at this point that their lives begin to diverge, because they had "different priorities."

Ok, that's where I'll leave off for now.  Part II follows tomorrow.  Arent' we all curious to find what happens to the Class brothers when they stop being exactly the same person and start making choices?  I know I am!