TENDERFOOT, NEW JERSEY — Marcus Palumbozo writes for three online libertarian media outlets and helps to administer a handful of libertarian Facebook pages as well.
With names such as “Proud to Be a Capitalist” and “Classically Liberally Conservative,” it becomes apparent from reading Palumbozo’s work that the 23-year-old is a big fan of Corporate America, and is convinced that anything that ails society can be fixed with a healthy dose of Free Market capitalism. Palumbozo has asserted that unions had nothing to do with securing 40-hour work weeks, ending child labor (which he argues isn’t really that bad if you live in an underdeveloped nation), or securing anything Middle Class Americans enjoy. Palumbozo has written two self-published e-books that contain lots of previously compiled and analyzed statistics and charts from various right-wing think tanks that validate his point of view, as all good scholars do.
Marcus is such a die-hard libertarian, many would presume that he’d rather die than take a handout from the government while he sorts out what to do with his life, and they’d be right. “I’m not going to let someone else’s taxes pay for my ride through life,” Palumbozo told The Political Garbage Chute recently adding, “and that’s why I’m choosing to live at home with Mom and Dad, so that I don’t have to move out and get a minimum wage job to try and support myself while I finish my schooling.” Palumbozo is currently attending North New Jersey University pursuing his degree in Economics, which he says should only be taught by “staunch conservatives” that share his principles, like one of his favorite arguments — that since Trickle-Down Economics is a nickname for Supply Side Economics that Trickle Down Economics therefore doesn’t exist and no one can criticize it.
“It’s just like the fact that homers don’t exist in baseball because they’re officially called Home Runs, not homers,” Palumbozo says as he opens a craft beer in an effort to seem cultured and refined. He told our reporter that even though he’s young, white, male and from middle class parentage, he can speak to the plight of every worker because he spent his summers working for a doughnut shop. “I worked for Yum Yum Donuts for like two years at minimum wage,” Palumbozo told us, continuing, “and it sucked. But I don’t support any laws that would make things better for working people because I truly believe the elite, ruling class when they tell me that business owners have no other alternative than to shaft their employees because of supply and demand and stuff.”
Palumbozo says it was while he was working at Yum Yum that he started checking out think tanks like The Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute. He said that he “found it weird at first that every bit of research they did arrived at their preconceived conclusions” about the free market but that “after awhile I realized that it’s better to just assume that people who have a stake in how economic policies are written wouldn’t cherry pick, hide, or intentionally misconstrue data to maintain their narrative” and that “the only human beings on Earth you can’t trust are the ones in government” because “if you go into business you’re clearly a good human being, but if you devote your life to public service you’re a Hitler.”
“Why would I go and actually get a job, work my way up from the bottom, and struggle to get anywhere, just so I can have even a semblance of moral high ground when I lambaste, demagogue and dehumanize the poor, when I can stay at home and wait until Dad gets a chance to talk this boss about maybe bringing me in,” Palumbozo asked rhetorically. “I mean, do I have to have actual, real-world experience in the job force for me to be a pretentious, pedantic hypocrite? It never stops Paul Ryan, the career politician, from bemoaning the state of the American work ethic, so why should it stop me,” Palumbozo asked our reporter.
Our reporter asked Marcus if he enjoys debating liberals online. “Oh yeah, hell yeah I do. I crush them too,” Palumbozo told us, though he admitted that he has to stay on Facebook pages that he and his friends run. “If I venture out onto Reddit, or onto a Facebook page some libtard runs, I can’t have my friends right there liking my posts and taking all my re-packaged right-wing think tankery as gospel, so I get my ass handed to me. That’s why I stick to the circle jerks I know most, the ones on libertarian pages.”
When asked if he feels like he’s a hypocrite for telling people who actually live on their own, work to support themselves and/or a family, and that still come up short every month and need help they are moochers and lazy while still living at home, living well off the success of his parents, and not so much his own life’s accomplishments. Palumbozo said, “No, I’m not a hypocrite. I’m just working smarter. And by working I mean writing horribly typed screeds filled with cherry picked data and incorrectly deduced conclusions.”
“It’s so much easier to write my think-tank regurgitation and snarky anti-middle class blog posts from the comfort of our living room than it would be in my very own apartment using my very own computer with my very own internet connection I pay for,” Palumbozo said as he was ending the interview.
Follow James on Twitter @JamboSchlarmbo.
