This is why Kickstarter is stupid, and why people pledging money in Kickstarter projects are at best misguided, (I use a polite word there as I myself fell into this trap when I pledged money for the Pathfinder Online project – incedently did any of you see their last video? Looking really shit guys, really shit.)

So in that first link our poor misguided Kickstarter comic book writer, (really, I fail to see why you need 50K to write a fucking comic book), falls down hard on his butt because he is no good with money. He then goes into a spectacular tirade against Capitalism as a way of explaining away his apparent need to not deliver on the Kickstarter pledges. At least with this level of public meltdown no one will ever take this guy seriously again. I mean, he’d have to get a sex change and move to Saudi Arabia to have any credibility at this point.

But this is the whole reason that Kickstarter is a bad joke – it enables people with no business or entrepreneurial skills to get their “dream idea” off the ground. If they had any of these skills they wouldn’t need a Kickstarter project. They would be able to sell their idea and even if they had no cash, not one dime, because the initial idea was great, (the really important part), they’d be able to get real life backers. But the internet does not follow real life. So now we have a situation where some douchebag with no financial skills at all is given 50K, screws up the entire business idea, (note – it’s not enough to start a business, you have to be able to run one too), and then burns a copy of the book he managed to produce each time a pledger asks for something they gave money for. Current book burnings stand at 127.

Entrepreneurs are very important people in society. Look around your home and everything in it that you own will have been produced by entrepreneurs. No government or bureaucrat produced a single thing in your home. If you don’t believe that then ask someone in Venezuela right now how much fun it is not being able to purchase basic things like toilet paper. Entrepreneurs are the true heroes of our soceity, not least because for every one that succeeds a whole bunch have to fail. But those that failed were necessary for the one that got up and running. That’s how the system works – everyone learns from what everyone else is doing, tweaks are made, ideas are adjusted based on those that went before and fell at the first hurdle, and then … success!

John Campbell, the individual with the comic book idea, was not an entrepreneur. He risked other people’s money and then didn’t even have the decency to ship what he had produced even when he had it in his hand. He rails against Capitalism, but it is exactly that system which enables people to succeed as entrepreneurs. Which means he is a fraud and a phoney and has no respect for other people’s hard earned money. And the Kickstarter system enables people like him.