Eric Cartman has a lot of dreams on South Park. Most of them are pretty racist and, thankfully, very few of them ever come to fruition. But there was one episode when a huge dream of his became a reality. As is often the case, things got even worse for Catrtman relatively quickly. And this time, it was thanks to the conceptual swinging pendulum known as capitalism.
Keeping in mind that Cartman contains multitudes, he can be defined by two key traits. First and foremost, Cartman loves money. Frankly, the main reason he tolerates his own mother is because she is his main source of income, and he is a greedy young man. That actually dovetails nicely into Cartman's second key trait, he is an incredibly selfish boy who borderline hates everyone else on the planet.
What fans found out about Cartman in Season 5, Episode 6 was that his selfishness and dislike of people had an interesting source. A lot of it came down to not wanting to wait in line for anything, particularly theme park rides. This was something that drove Cartman nuts. So when Cartman's grandmother died and left him one million dollars, he was finally able to take care of all of his problems in one shot.
Cartman used the money to buy North Park Funland, a failing amusement park that he loved and changed it to Cartmanland. He did this so that he could have the entire park to himself. With no one else allowed in Funland, that meant that he didn't have to wait in line for any of the rides. And that's exactly what he did. Well, until the realities of capitalism caught up with him and his amusement park.
Cartman didn't understand that Funland didn't run on magic. It needed electricity and water. Rides also tended to break down, and someone had to repair them. There were also the concession stands. Cartman wasn't going to an amusement park without eating a lot of food.
However, none of this could happen without money, and there's no money without thousands of patrons enjoying the park. This reality set in on Cartman rather quickly, given his situation. As much as he wanted to keep Funland all to himself, he needed money to keep it operational, and he spent all of his buying the amusement park in the first place. That meant he needed to destroy the Eden he had created to save it.
Cartman had to start letting people into Funland so that he could finance its operation. While it became incredibly profitable under his tenure, that meant that he had to share the park. It was at that point that the realities of capitalism and the basic tenets of doing business utterly annihilated Cartman's dream of a people-free Funland utopia. His greed and his hatred of people both failed him.
The irony was that he ended up selling the park back to its original owner, Mr. Foon. Then, the IRS showed up and took all of Cartman's money to cover most of his back taxes on all of his profits in addition to leaving a bill for another $13,000. It was a hard lesson in capitalism for Cartman, and the true cost of taking two steps forward in the business world often results in three steps back.