FORT AVIDTÈ, NORTH CAROLINA — On his Facebook page entitled “Unrestricted Capitalism FTW,” 24-year-old Jake Hubert applies what he’s learned at North Carolina’s most prestigious college and doles out economic philosophy in memes and rant-like posts. Hubert is currently in consideration for the doctorate program at his university, and he claims to “forget more about economics than that hack Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman knows.” Hubert is respected by all his friends for being able to engage with anyone on his page, imply they don’t know as much as he does by peppering them with questions about specific, high-level economic theories and equations that most laymen wouldn’t know in the first place, and he says his “smugness is [his] greatest strength.”
A recent meme Mr. Hubert put up on Unrestricted Capitalism FTW was quite popular, and he emailed it to various independent media outlets, hoping they would engage him for an interview. Hubert’s meme is pointed in language as it asks right at the start, “Did you earn enough money to justify having that child,” and from there it takes a further sarcastic tone toward those living in poverty, calling taxes used to pay for social welfare programs “confiscating” his earnings and accusing those who have children before they can afford them of making “imprudent decisions.”
“What I’m trying to say in that meme,” Hubert told our reporter, “is that as a hard-working college student who will probably one day have a job in the private sector, I don’t want my money taken away from me because someone else decided to have a baby they can’t afford.” Hubert said he is “sick to death of hard working Americans having to pay for the fact that people can’t keep it in their pants.”
Our reporter asked Hubert if his parents are financially successful. “Oh yeah, they own a boat rental company in the Hamptons,” Hubert said, “but they worked hard to get there. In fact, when my mother became pregnant with me, they really didn’t have two pennies to scrape together.” The interviewer asked Hubert if he thinks that makes him at least somewhat hypocritical to chastise poor people for having children they can’t afford when his own parents did the same thing, and Hubert dismissed that question. “It’s way different,” he told us, “because my mom and dad weren’t moochers. They just went and lived with my dad’s parents in Connecticut for awhile, and my dad worked for his dad since my grampa had a successful flooring business already established.”
“I’m just tired of being called the Bad Guy in these situations,” Hubert said, “just because I callously and coldly would much rather that poor people get no assistance. Because isn’t it better to punish the children of the very poor than it is to ask people who have a ton of money to pay a little more? I think so, and I’m pretty much always right. I have the algorithm here to prove it too.”
When asked if he thinks people like Bill Gates and Warren Buffet are bad guys for advocating higher taxes, despite being tremendously wealthy themselves, Hubert laughed. “Nice try at a gotcha question, lame-o,” Hubert said, adding, “Gates and Buffet are just misguided. They lost sight of the fact that only through hoarding your money, then passing it onto your greedy, spoiled and entitled kids, can you keep our economy really humming along.”
“Tell me, why am I the bad guy for thinking that it might be best for a little Social Darwinism to take hold here,” Hubert asked rhetorically. “I mean, what’s worse — asking rich people to give another few pennies on their dollar, or telling poor people we are going to insist their family and friends all stop procreating and die off so that we don’t have to be inconvenienced by a tax or two?” Then after a moment, “I think you know what’s worse.”
Follow James on Twitter @JamboSchlarmbo.
