Dave Ramsey is possibly one of the best examples of a mediocre white man failing upward.
His entire origin story is literally failing multiple times at being a real estate investor until he finally got lucky and it worked out.
His life story illustrates basically perfectly that if you have enough money and luck, you can be pretty wealthy basically extremely easily.
I say easily because any fucking moron can spew self help bullshit.
Sure, the debt snowball is generally a good strategy, but the rest of his advice is basically slave away, sigma grindset (before that term came about), eat rice and beans for 5 years so that you can be well off after the best years of your life have gone by.
He is a walking talking manifestation of survivorship bias, and there have been many times he gets offended by the idea that everyone cannot be as lucky as him, which he incorrectly thinks is because they are lazy or stupid.
Anyway, Adam Smith should be but is not famous for basically deriding landlords as parasites.
They always leave that out of American Econ textbooks. I know because I have a BS in Econ and had to randomly stumble across this outside of my coursework.
It should go without saying that, as with any conservative, they know nothing about Marx beyond the Communist Manifesto (at best, usually its just 'Communism is when government gives money to the poors) which contains next to nothing of his thoughts on Economics compared to his other works.
It would take an actual Economist or something like that to explain to this insane number of ways that it gets easier and easier to make more money once you are already wealthy, the number of ways the average citizen pays in ways they do not immediately see to subsidize all kinds of businesses.
Ramsey has been a shitbag for a long time. This is no surprise.
My parents gave me a subscription to his financial university program a number of years ago. Some of the basic concepts are great, like the debt snowball. On the other hand, he places the blame for insufficient income on the people; if you simply can't cut enough expenses, then you need to earn more money, so get a better job you lazy schmuck. ...As if that actually worked for most people. It entirely ignores economic realities, where a large number of people have to lose so that a very few people can win.
The snowball method can be helpful in a psychological sense, but it's less than ideal from a financial standpoint. (You can pay down debt faster with more conventional methods, IF you stick to them.)
Right, like if I'm remembering terms correctly, avalanche is the way to go, highest interest first.
Dave Ramsey is awful though, doesn't take much to figure that out.
“This is straight out of the Karl Marx playbook — this is not out of the Adam Smith playbook," Dave Ramsey said about UBI on "The Ramsey Show" last summer.
Funny considering Smith and Marx have far more in common than not.
Handing out cash with no strings attached discourages people from working and reaping the rewards of individual success making some undeserving piece of shit even richer.
