The Story of Broke

Thanks for sharing this video! I loved the one about "Stuff" and had no idea they'd produced a new one (that is also excellent!) that is so relevant to the Occupy Wall Street movements that I am also 100% in support of!

Thanks Elizabeth! You might also be interested in these other videos produced by the same people:
The Story of Citizens United
http://www.yesmagazine.org/[…]/the-story-of-citizens-united
The Story of Electronics
http://www.yesmagazine.org/planet/the-story-of-electronics
The Story of Cosmetics
http://www.yesmagazine.org/planet/the-story-of-cosmetics
The Story of Bottled Water
http://www.yesmagazine.org/[…]/the-story-of-bottled-water
The Story of Cap and Trade
http://www.yesmagazine.org/[…]/the-story-of-cap-and-trade

I will definitely be checking those out!

I have a very Right leaning friend who I debate issues like this with. I need some help. He is in disagreement that it is the role of the government to take care of its citizens and asks to be shown where in the Constitution this is stated. Here is his reply to this Yes article which I had sent to him:

Show me where the Founders and original American states or citizens said it was the American nations" job to do this: "...provide basic services for its citizens." (from the Yes article)
 
I'd love to see it. I know some in America tried it and failed miserably every time:
 

New Harmony: Scottish industrialist and idealist Robert Owen bought the Rappite village of Harmony in Indiana, and used it to test his theories of property, education, co-operative manufacture, and higher culture. The experiment persisted from 1825 to 1827 when it broke down in factional disputes, though even long afterward, or perhaps even today, New Harmony is an unusually interesting town. Josiah Warren and Frederick Evans, later Shaker elder, were resident, and Frances Wright blew through town in her bustling about. There were other Owenite settlements, notably at Yellow Springs, Ohio.

Nashoba: 1826-30. A community for freed slaves and white experimenters founded by the amazingly cool English freak Frances (Fanny) Wright near Memphis, Tennessee. Accusations of miscegenation and local hatred and Wright's removal for fund-raising purposes closed the place down. This sucker is hard to imagine in its extreme courage. 1828 has Wright delivering a July 4 address in New Harmony, and visiting Josiah Warren in Cincinnati. Warren remains a staunch feminist throughout his life, while later rejecting the idea of "free love."

Brook Farm: a transcendentalist community founded by George Ripley in 1841. Adorned by very smart people doing physical labor and playing music and writing poetry, including Hawthorne. Emerson and Bronson Alcott participated from the fringe. Emerson called Brook Farm "an age of reason in a patty-pan." Made a transition to Fourierism in 1844, after which, like any decent Fourierist experiment, it disintegrated.

Fruitlands: extremely small transcendentalist community (or house) established in Harvard, Massachusetts by Bronson Alcott in 1843. It fell apart after seven months, among other things, in the struggles between the English reformer Charles Lane - a fanatic who was pushing a vegan ("Pythagorean") diet, celibacy, and many other ascetic disciplines - and Alcott's wife and daughters. Louisa May Alcott fictionalized the situation in her story "Transcendental Wild Oats."

Fourierist Phalanxes: Charles Fourier proves that all these folks lived in an era when a man could sit in his garret in Paris hallucinating, write it down, and call it science. This was also Pearl Andrews's approach to empirical investigation: an a priori science based on introspection into the mind of an eccentric. Fourier had a utopian plan to organize the whole world into big old "phalanxes," which looked something like Versailles. The American experiments included La Reunion near Dallas, Texas and the North American Phalanx - probably the largest and most successful Fourierist project - in Monmouth County, NJ (1841-56), but it too eventually failed due to human nature.