ReasonTV
Published on 2 Mar 2018Forget the Oscars! Here are five great movies made over the past quarter-century that any libertarian will (must?) enjoy.
_____The Incredibles (2004)
This Pixar film directed by Brad Bird is so full of speeches extolling individualism, it sometimes sounds like an Ayn Rand novel (in fact, Rand is clearly part of inspiration for the character of Edna Bird). Even the supervillain in The Incredibles is a creature of self-invention and self-improvement. While the Incredibles are born with their powers, Syndrome is a normie who worships Mr. Incredible and is desperate to be his sidekick.
Like an animated version of Richard Nixon, Syndrome’s ambition ultimately gets the best of him.
The Barbarian Invasions (2003)
Québécois director Denys Arcand’s brilliant sequel to The Decline of the American Empire is the single-best depiction of the depredations of socialized medicine. Canada’s health-care system is so sclerotic that the movie’s protagonist, a retired academic named Rémy, cannot even score the drugs he needs to commit suicide until his estranged son, a banker, buys them on the black market.
Even more disturbing is the moment when the terminally ill Rémy and his former colleagues admit that their intellectual faddishness led them to embrace every awful left-wing “ism” of the past 30 years despite their massive human toll.
Dallas Buyers Club (2013)
Set in the 1980s, Matthew McConaughey plays Ron Woodroof, a boozey roughneck who is given 30 days to live after being diagnosed with AIDS. Faced with a death sentence, he schools himself on a wide variety of treatments, first in Mexico and then all over the world. With the help of a cross-dressing party girl named Rayon, Woodroof skirts FDA prohibitions against importing, using, and selling unapproved drugs by creating a “buyers club,” in which members pay a monthly fee and assume all risks.
The depiction of official indifference to patient suffering and the bureaucratic quashing of medical freedom even for people who are certain to die is inspirational, especially now that even Donald Trump has endorsed “right-to-try” legislation that would allow terminally ill patients access to non-approved medicines.
Joy (2015)
Jennifer Lawrence became a mega-star playing the anti-government rebel Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games movies. While there’s no shortage of libertarian sentiment coursing through that trilogy, it’s actually a quieter movie starring Lawrence that embodies libertarian virtues of hard work, commercial innovation, and entrepreneurship.
In Joy, Lawrence plays real-life “Miracle Mop” inventor Joy Magano, who helped make cleaning your floors easier while making herself rich. The film is nothing less than a paean to capitalism’s genius at allowing self-expression and self-fulfillment.
In a dramatic scene with Bradley Cooper, who plays an executive at a home-shopping network, Joy summarizes in a few sentences what it took Joseph Schumpeter, Friedrich Hayek, and Milton Friedman whole books to say.
As former Reason Editor Virginia Postrel wrote, the film “acknowledges the wealth-creating value of incremental improvements even in the most mundane items.”
Ghostbusters (1984)
Released in 1984, Ghostbusters quickly became one of most successful comedies in film history.
The movie was perfectly in synch with the Reagan Revolution’s valorization of business and demonization of government. Ghostbusters begins with a team of paranormal investigators getting kicked out of Columbia University and starting a ghost-hunting business. But even though New York is literally being invaded by evil spirits, the real villain of the movie is not the otherwordly demon Gozer but an Environmental Protection Agency bureaucrat named Walter Peck, who shuts down their operation and puts the city at risk.
Well, what do you think? How far off the mark are we? What great libertarian movies would you add to the list? Let us know in the comments.
Produced by Todd Krainin. Written and narrated by Nick Gillespie.
March 3, 2018
5 Great Libertarian Movies!
China’s growing presence in the Indian Ocean
At Strategy Page, a useful primer on recent Chinese moves to set up another facility in India’s sphere of influence, this time in the Maldives:
The Maldive Islands in relation to southern India and Sri Lanka
Image from Google Maps.
China and India are threatening each other over who should do what in Maldive Islands just south of India. This conflict heated up at the end of 2017 when China and the Maldives signed an agreement that allowed China to build and operate a “Joint Ocean Observation Station”. This monitoring station would be built on an atoll that is the closest part of the Maldives to India. Opposition politicians in the Maldives claim China has already taken possession of sixteen small islands and that China has been investing heavily in the Maldives economy and influential politicians.
This agreement was apparently obtained by Chinese bribes and assurances that there would be more Chinese investments. Meanwhile the Maldives government is in chaos over elected officials and the Supreme Court judges disagreeing about who should actually be in charge. The tiny (248 square kilometers spread over 1,192 coral atolls spread over 90,000 square kilometers of water off the southern coast of India) nation has a mostly Moslem (98 percent) population of 430,000 plus 100,000 foreign workers (a third of them illegals). Most of the population is concentrated on about 15 percent of the islands. The per capita income is about $10,000 and most of it is based on tourism followed by fishing. Many young men have been attracted to Islamic terrorism but there is not much religious violence in the Maldives. While a democracy the religious parties and military have kept the government in turmoil by asserting decidedly non-democratic powers.
Over the last decade India has become alarmed at growing Chinese investment in neighboring countries (like Sri Lanka, Maldives and Bangladesh). Chinese firms are more experienced and effective at arranging these foreign investments and India’s smaller neighbors feel more comfortable with investment from distant China rather than neighbor (and sometimes big bully) India. The Chinese economic investments often have military implications, like China building satellite ground stations in Sri Lanka, a major port in Pakistan and now an “Ocean Observation Station” in the Maldives.
China had earlier persuaded the Maldives to join its OBOR (One Belt, One Road) project. The Maldives would be part of the “maritime road” going from Chia, through the newly annexed South China Sea and into the Indian Ocean and sea routes to the Persian Gulf the Suez Canal and East Africa and beyond. The Maldives government has always been unstable and Islamic radicalism is still an issue there. Islamic terrorists were never able to establish themselves in the Maldives, although they tried. In 2007 three men were sentenced to 15 years in prison for carrying out a terror bombing attack three months earlier that wounded a dozen tourists. The Islamic radicals were intent on destroying the tourist industry, which is the main source of income in the Maldives, because they saw it as un-Islamic. Most people on the Maldives did not agree with that, and justice was swift. However, ten Islamic radicals responsible for planning the bombings fled the country the day before the attack and are being sought in Pakistan.
Cuban Missile Crisis – Black Saturday – Extra History – #3
Extra Credits
Published on 1 Mar 2018*Sponsored by DomiNations: https://smarturl.it/CubanMissile1
With simultaneous nuclear tests by both the US and Russia, and tense miscommunications among troops on the ground, in the air, and on the water, the doomsday clock ticked to 11:59 PM for one fateful day.
Arguments against having students read To Kill a Mockingbird
I’m very much anti-censorship, so in the vast majority of cases where “pressure groups” are demanding that a book be removed from a school reading list, I’m usually against the idea. Recently, a demand to pull Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird was denied, but Ann Althouse explains why, unlike so many other efforts, in her opinion this one deserves a fair hearing:
I think the argument against selecting this book — of all books — as the go-to reading about race discrimination is, in fact, very strong. I understand that schools defend their own choices and are dug in here, but the Kameetas made an excellent argument (as far as I can tell from this summary). The black characters are basically “spectators and bystanders.” I think the book is also a problem because:
1. It’s a rape story where the woman lies about rape. Why should the first thing children learn about rape be about the woman lying?
2. Rape is a complex subject, difficult for 9th graders to understand, and yet this rape story is cartoonish, in which the man is absolutely, unquestionably innocent. Why present a book as literature when it deals with this important subject in a completely unsubtle way, completely subordinated to another subject the author is bent on telling (the outrageous accusation against an innocent man)?
3. Racial discrimination is also a complex subject, especially as it persists today, but the racial injustice shown in the book is so exaggerated that it allows a present-day reader to feel smugly distanced. Nobody we know is that over-the-top racist, so weren’t those people back then terrible? That’s not how high-quality literature is supposed to work on readers. They should need to question their own simplistic preconceptions.
4. It’s not a subtle telling of the story of how courts work and might carry forward racial prejudice. The evidence of the man’s innocence is so completely obvious that you have a complete breakdown of justice. That doesn’t begin to enlighten students about how there could be racial disparities in the justice system today. It invites them to sit back and think people in the past were crazy.
5. There is blatant stereotyping of the poor white family, and their problems are not treated as perhaps a consequence of poverty. They’re treated as genetically deficient. They are truly the irredeemable deplorables.
6. There is great sentimentality about this book in the older generation. Having reread this book very carefully and written about it (in the Michigan Law Review, here), I hold the informed opinion that it is not a very good book and the practice of imposing on the younger generations — with endless pressure to regard it as a great classic — deserves serious, vigorous questioning.
How A Man Shall Be Armed: 11th Century
Royal Armouries
Published on 20 Feb 2017Discover how a Norman knight of the 11th Century would be armed for battle with the finest equipment available.
QotD: Elite incompetence
Most people, most of the time, are perfectly happy to let elites run the country. After all, it seems to make the elites happy to run run things, and as long as they’re reasonably competent at it, and do it reasonably unobtrusively, no one much seems to care. But when elite competence is compromised by faulty ideology and cronyism, people become unhappy. And when the elite response to complaints is dismissal or insult, political problems begin to bloom. People begin to think about politics. They begin to do things. It is no coincidence, as our Soviet friends used to say, that the last decade has seen the rise of the TEA Party, the Occupy Movement, and the Trump phenomenon. People of all political stripes are becoming unhappy.
I think we’re about to watch the elites start paying a price for their incompetence, inattention and contempt. Euroskepticism is on the rise elsewhere in Europe. If EU membership were put to a popular vote in the Netherlands, Spain, or Sweden, there is a good chance that Leave would win there, too. Indeed, it’s possible that a vote to leave the EU might even win in France, the nation for whom creating and strengthening the EU has been the primary policy goal for 60 years.
Perhaps the “Vote Remain, you virulent racist!” PR campaign for staying in the EU needs a bit more thought.
Dale Franks, “Vote Properly, You Virulent Racist!”, Questions and Observations, 2016-06-28.
