“The author does not understand socialism,” read the letter from MacMillan in reply to the submission of Ayn Rand’s novella, Anthem. They turned it down. Actually, the publisher didn’t understand socialism. Hardly anyone did in 1937, when this book was written. Rand, however, did understand socialism. She understood it so well that she knew it would result in the opposite of what it promised and that its proponents would eventually come to embrace its grim reality, rather than repudiate the system of thought.

In many ways, this book is one of the best dystopian novels ever written because it puts the central focus on the key failing of socialism: its opposition to progress. How is that possible given that progress is a central slogan in socialist thinking? The problem is that by collectivizing private property, socialism removes the machinery of progress itself. It abolishes prices and profits and calculation and the incentive to create. It puts a premium on political control, and politicians resent the revolutionary implications of entrepreneurship. Therefore, a consistently socialist society would not only be poor and backward; it would revel in those features and call them the goal.

Think about it. This was the 1930s, long before the environmental movement and long before the primitivist streak in socialist thinking was to emerge as an outright agenda to be imposed by force. But as a child in the old Soviet Union, Rand had seen it in action. She had seen how entrepreneurship and creativity had to be sacrificed for the collective, and how this drove civilization straight into the ground. A totalitarian society would not be a world with amazing technology and flying cars, but would exist only at a subsistence level. And it would try to stay that way.

This edition appears in print at a strange time in American politics. Every day, regulatory agencies are pouring out mandates that degrade our technology. They are degrading our washing machines, dishwashers, soaps, paint, light bulbs, toilets, water systems, lawn mowers, medicines, microwaves, showers, hot-water heaters, gasoline and gas cans, and probably thousands of other things. These regulations are passed in the name of the environment, security, and safety. Their one result is to drive us back in time, making the future worse than the present and probably even worse than the past.

That’s only the beginning. Through intellectual property laws, the state literally assigned ownership to ideas that are the source of innovation, thereby restricting them and entangling entrepreneurs in endless litigation and confusion. Products are kept off the market. Firms that would come into existence do not. Profits that would be earned never appear. Intellectual property has institutionalized slow growth and landed the economy in a thicket of absurdity.

So we’ve finally come full circle in the land to which Rand emigrated because it was a free country. We’ve adopted features of the system she fled. In that sense, this small book is an amazing critique of precisely the unfreeness of the system under which we increasingly live. In that sense, the dystopian world she presents is a distilled version of where we are headed. Even the author’s theory that the word “I” is the thing that is most feared by the regime has resonance.

What is the way out? We cannot give up our ideals. We must have development, innovation, and progress because they are the sources of life, and we cannot give up life. Despite all her detractors say, Rand was a genius and a visionary. This small book underscores that she saw things that no one else saw, and saw them long before anyone else did.

Before the third of the Batman trilogy hit theaters, I had heard that The Dark Knight Rises was a film without hope, with a long and dreary narrative that never loosens its grip. It leaves the viewer without a sense of answers.

I saw it and left confused. It saw it again, and left confused again. All the while, I kept wondering if this interpretive effort would pay off. Maybe it’s just another movie and lacks the ideological significance of the previous two.

I too had read several reviews that had condemned the film from a left-wing point view, arguing that it took a cheap shot at the Occupy Wall Street movement, suggesting that it consists mainly of brainless menaces who are easily manipulated by a strongman leader. The filmmakers deny this.

Regardless, this was probably the best political feature of the film.

However, the merit of its warning about left-wing populism was seriously compromised by the portrayal of the Gotham cops as saintly guardians of the social order. Neoconservatives loved this part of the film, made all the better to them because the prisons are full and Gotham is ruled by a civilian-led authoritarian regime of tight law and surveillance — the neocon dream come true.

What’s going on here? Why is the movie so full of mixed messages and, in the end, so unsatisfying?

Finally, it hit me. And this will be perfectly obvious once you hear it.

The problem is that the film gives Gotham (and us) a choice between two forms of despotism, one “left wing” and one “right wing,” and asks us to choose the lesser of two evils. We can have one of two systems: bureaucratic/authoritarian or revolutionary/dictatorial. The idea of a self-managing society is just out of the question. The film biases that choice by showing one as offered by the evil villain and the other by a corrupt, yet stable status quo.

Do you see now? The Dark Knight Rises replicates the choice that the present political system presents to us. We look at the choices and throw up our hands, knowing full well that neither really offers answers to the problem. Watching this film is like watching the Sunday talk shows that feature two flavors of the same poison. It’s the State of the Union address and the response to the State of the Union address, neither of which tells what’s true or gives us a way out.

It’s the two sides of the street fights between the Occupy protesters and the cops. It’s the left versus the right. It’s Republicans versus Democrats. It’s “law and order” versus revolutionary dictatorship. It’s Italian fascism versus Soviet communism. It’s the two sides of the Spanish Civil War. It is also the choice faced by old Rome in its late stage: rule by a corrupt oligarchy of the Senate or a cruel imperial dictatorship of Caesar.

It is the choice given to every nation in its late stages. No truly informed citizen believes that this is all that should be on the menu. But The Dark Knight Rises doesn’t show us another way. It never shows us the option of a self-managing society where people are permitted to shape their own destinies apart from the will of two gangs of political elites. Whoever wins the great struggle over Gotham’s future, the results will be imposed from the top down.

The result is that viewers are left with a sense of hopelessness in the same way that the current political climate denies people authentic hope. Whatever happens will come from the center and top, leaving the rest of us unfree to manage our own lives, keep and use our own property, mind our own business, and cobble together our own human associations. In The Dark Knight Rises, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are not even distant memories.

The film opens with Bruce Wayne/Batman in a long period of retirement, living alone in his mansion during eight years of stability in Gotham. But what is this stability, really? It’s not prosperity, because the homes for orphans are full and they can’t get jobs once they are too old to live there. The prisons are jammed with supposedly violent thugs and the leaders of organized crime, swept off the streets thanks to a new draconian law that unleashed government power.

The new law is named after martyred district attorney Harvey Dent. In the first scenes of Gotham, the city is celebrating Harvey Dent Day. The police are in firm control of the city, as led by the police commissioner and the political powers of the city. From the perspective of the elites, nothing is wrong. Life is blessedly boring. Crime has fallen so low that police joke about soon having to chase down people with overdue library books.

Is there corruption? Of course. This is Gotham. In fact, the corruption is so deep and pervasive that the saintly district attorney after whom the present order is named is a lie. He is actually the villain named Two-Face — a perfect metaphor for every member of the political class. In his tenure, he said one thing and did another. People thought he was doing good, but he was secretly doing evil. Even the best men of the current regime in Gotham are willing to spread the lie of the greatness of Dent, solely for the purpose of maintaining government power and immunizing the power structure from criticism.

The strongman dictator Bane sees the vulnerability of this seemingly stable system. He perceives that people are seeking something, some form of liberation, and that he can use this political impulse to solidify his control over Gotham on his way to plotting its final destruction. He recruits the unemployed to work under the city in the sewers to plot his takeover.

Bane has plenty of people willing to risk death to work for him, both because they are desperate and because Bane offers a radical alternative to the present order. Meanwhile, the city elites go on about their daily tasks, completely oblivious to what is happening beneath the surface.

At the appointed hour, Bane initiates shock and awe in the form of massive explosions throughout the city. At the football game where a large portion of Gotham’s citizens are gathered, Bane blows up the field, and announces to everyone that he is the new leader of the city. Their elites have failed and now a people’s revolution is taking place.

“Gotham, take control,” Bane says, “take control of your city. Behold, the instrument of your liberation! Identify yourself to the world!”

The rich are looted. The prisoners are set free to become armed gangs in the Bane regime. Show trials are established on the model of the late stages of the French Revolution. Guilt is presumed and everyone is sent to die, to the cheers of the workers and peasants. Meanwhile, the bourgeoisie cower in their homes in fear.

This is when the Dark Knight rises to set the world right again. His most-loyal allies in this army are the massive number of police who had been recruited during the years of seemingly crimeless stability.

As audience members, we are being asked to cheer for Batman because he opposes the bloody and ruthless Bane, who is a Stalin-like figure. But the best possible result that Gotham can get out of this is a restoration and intensification of the previous fascist system of police, prisons, rule by corrupt elites, and mandatory obedience to Gotham’s version of the Patriot Act and the Department of Homeland Security.

As a result, it is hard to cheer. The choice is left or right dictatorship. It is Occupy versus the cops. It is Stalin versus Mussolini all over again. It is Hoover versus FDR. It is the Democrat despot or the Republican despot.

This is the dreadful choice that political systems all over the world have set up. You have to decide, based on your cultural identity and ideological preferences, what form of top-down rule you desire. There’s Plan A or Plan B, but no Plan C. There are two types of prison cells, but there is no way out of the prison itself. Our choices are not really authentic choices. All of us are inchoately aware that whatever the results are, we will not be freer than we were before.

One of the most-compelling images of the film is a prison that is considered the worst prison in the world. It is buried deep in a hole. You can look up 200 feet in the air and see the light, but there is no way that ordinary people can climb out. This is a chilling image of where most people in the developed world are today. We look up and we see a far-distant light, and that light is called liberty. But we don’t see a way to get there.

This much we can see. There is no Dark Knight who will save us. We must save ourselves.

[LFB]

How gigantically humongous and intrusive is the federal government? A traditional measure is to look at the pages of regulations in the Federal Register, which is, by now, probably the world’s largest book collection. The problem with this approach is that it takes no account of how a single bad regulation can have monstrously deleterious effects.

Copyright regulation is a good example of this. There was no universal enforcement until the very late part of the 19th century, and terms were mostly short in the early days of this regulation. In the course of the 20th century, regulations became ever more tight and the copyright terms ever longer, so much so that today, the words you sign away to a conventional publisher are theirs to keep for your lifetime plus 70 years!

One standard argument for doing this is that noncopyrighted works will not be efficiently exploited. You have to assign ownership or else the resource will vanish into the ether. No one will care about it, and civilization will lose extremely valuable literary works. Our market for ideas will be impoverished.

Now, to me, this argument seems obviously false, but that’s probably because of my own experience in publishing. I’ve seen it happen — so many times that it is predictable — that once a work has fallen out of print but is still under some kind of protection, it is mostly neglected by the heirs. No one who “owns” the work has the incentive to bring it to light, while those who care about it fear the law or don’t want to pay some arbitrary price set by the owners.

Meanwhile, when a work is public domain, there are dozens of people bidding to get it into print. This was true all throughout history, actually. The reason American school kids in the 19th century read British literature is that it was not regulated in the United States, and therefore, it could be sold very cheaply and distributed very widely. It is true today: Whether music or books, the material in the commons is far more in demand than that which is regulated. And the demand leads to the supply.

In other words, the opposite of the conventional exploitation theory is correct. The copyrighted works drop from memory, while the public domain works last and last. But of course, this observation draws from my deep involvement in the industry, and we can’t expect academic scribblers to understand anything about how the world actually works in real life.

One academic, however, actually bothered to test the theory that protected works are more widely available than works in the commons. The research of Paul Heald of the University of Illinois College of Law shows that public domain works are far more widely distributed, while protected works have a habit of falling down the memory hole.

Lately, he worked with a research assistant who came up with a script that dug through the Amazon.com book inventory to look for books currently in print and their years of publication. With the invention of scanners and print-on-demand technology, there was an explosion of works — and, of course, works that are in public domain because they were published before 1922.

The point is thereby thoroughly proven, and the “market failure” argument against the free market is once again debunked:

But there is more significance to this chart than meets the eye. For years, I’ve suspected that there was a serious problem developing due to government regulations. There is a vast gap into which millions of books have fallen. They can be reprinted or republished only at high risk and expense. Many of these books have uncertain copyright status, the “owners” are asking too high a price or can’t be found, or are orphaned. The costs are too high. I’ve had experiences with probably a hundred or so titles in this class, and I’ve always assumed that thousands or millions more fall into this category.

There was a brief moment in the early days of Google when the company naively imagined that it could do the right thing and make all of this literature available for instant viewing and printing. They had the technology to rescue it all and bring it to the whole world. Publishers, backed by regulations that favor them, went bonkers. Google tried a profit-sharing agreement. Didn’t work. Finally, Google bailed and cooperated with the prevailing system.

The results you see in this graph. There is an 80-year black hole in which literature is being buried. In some ways, a whole century of ideas is being forced under a rock by government in league with large publishers. And it is getting worse by the day. Publishers are going through their back catalogs and threatening anyone who puts even a scrap online. Not that they plan new editions; they are just claiming what they think of as their assets.

This is a case of incredibly tragic loss. As you can see from the above chart, the literature of 1850 is more available than the literature of 1970. How preposterous is that? This is all a direct result of unprecedented, outrageous regulations that have effectively put a censorship veil over history’s most productive period of literary creation. This entire world is trapped in libraries that no one visits or is being put on remainder racks so that libraries can create more space for coffee bars.

There is a more general lesson that pertains to all government regulations. Even one line can be impossibly damaging to industry and to social advancement. It is extremely difficult to quantify the losses. This is just one case, but it is an important one because it deals with the most important thing any civilization possesses: its treasury of ideas. That treasury has been thrown to the bottom of the sea. Someday, explorers will discover it and wonder how any society could have let this happen even though it had the means to do otherwise.

[LFB]

Get this: The federal bureaucrat who last month started the litigation against Apple and book publishers for ebook pricing is the same person who, back in the stone age, represented Netscape in its lawsuit against Microsoft.

Recall that Microsoft was trying to give away its Internet Explorer to computer users for free. Netscape went nuts and got the government to clobber Microsoft for being so nice to consumers. It put the company through litigation hell and even demanded that Microsoft change its operating system code to untie it from IE.

The person’s name is Sharis Pozen, and she is acting head of the Justice Department’s antitrust division and a political appointee of the Obama administration. She claims that she is threatening state violence against Apple and publishers for pricing collusion — and that it’s her job to protect consumers.

Interesting. She began her career trying to protect the rights of an old-line company to rip off consumers. To her, a price of zero was unfair competition. She was sure that a browser should be a paid product. The progress of history flattens that argument. Today, dozens of companies beg you to download their browser for free. Browser use is all over the place, sort of like a free market. There is no Microsoft monopoly, contrary to the overheated predictions.

Given that history, one might suppose she would retire from public life and maybe go into flower arranging or something. Instead, she is still at it. Last year, she denied a proposed merger between T-Mobile and AT&T that would have improved your cell service. This year, she says that a deal between publishers and Apple is harming consumers, so she has to act.

Government had absolutely nothing to do with inventing the ebook. It didn’t invent the ereader, either. The Nook, Kindle, iPad, and all the others were purely the products of private enterprise. So too the distribution system that makes millions of titles instantly downloadable with a quick click, storing your downloads in the cloud. The whole apparatus has given new life to the book itself, and represents a bigger shift in publishing than even the printing press.

But we are supposed to believe that Sharis Pozen knows exactly what the prices of ebooks should be. She knows how the contractual relations between publishers and distributors are supposed to work. She knows when there’s competition and collusion. She knows how to protect the consumer against high prices because, of course, we stupid consumers are all sitting here completely clueless about whether $9 or $14 is too much to pay. We’d just mindlessly let go of our money, scammed by private enterprise, were it not for Sharis Pozen looking after our interests.

There is no arrogance in this world to compare with the government bureaucrat’s.

There is no way that any mortal can know in advance how ebook pricing should work. For years, people tried to create a profitable market in selling PDF downloads. Some firms succeeded, but only in a limited way by selling to large institutions, and even then, the product add-ons had to be pretty impressive: fancy searches, large collections, citation help, and more. This model never penetrated the retail sector.

Why? It’s hard to say for sure, but in hindsight, one might speculate that the PDF format just isn’t very consumer friendly. It is fine for many purposes, and miraculous by any historical standard. But in the end, it was not commodifiable on a mass scale.

Then came the ebook. It had an HTML structure that allowed fonts to be increased and decreased. It allowed instant search. Navigation was a snap. It mimicked the page turn of a physical book. It was lightweight. For all these reasons, and probably some reasons that I haven’t thought of, the ebook became commodifiable. I never would have believed it, but there it is.

I know that I’m hooked myself.

But how does pricing work? A conventional government model would examine costs and presume that prices are marked up along a preset path. This model has a superficial, if fallacious, plausibility with physical goods, but it is wholly irrelevant to digital goods. With digital goods, in which the marginal unit cost of each additional item is effectively zero, the price is, very obviously, nothing but a point of agreement between buyer and seller, having nothing to do with costs of production.

So it’s anyone’s guess what the final price of an ebook ought to be. The market dictates this. At first, publishers were selling on a wholesale model and letting the distributors determine the prices. As the distributors do with physical books, they were pushing prices lower and lower, and the publishers started to complain.

That’s when Apple shifted to an agency model of pricing. The publisher sets any price and the distributor takes 30 percent. That way everyone can make a profit. This also allowed smaller publishers to get involved. Even a sole proprietor can get involved and push out ebooks to the world.

So what’s the problem? Apple and Amazon have made it part of their contractual relationships with those using their services that they do not want to be undersold by another company. And why? Of course they want the business, but more tellingly, they are trying to incentivize producers to bring down prices in the interest of making deals.

This is standard procedure in Web pricing. If you are using a service, the service wants to be able to offer the best deal available. Actually, Amazon and others have been doing this for many years. The service user can accept or reject the deal.

Here’s the thing. If this is not the right model, it will hurt the service it delivers. Others can compete. Authors and publishers can establish their own systems. Markets work these things out for themselves. In this case, it appears that Amazon is the only complaining party: it does not want Apple to gain a foothold.

Stabilization is Chaos: “Monetary policy all over the world has followed the advice of the stabilizers. It is high time that their influence, which has already done harm enough, should be overthrown.”
— F.A. Hayek, 1932

The ebook market is brand-new, for goodness sake. It is going to go through many changes before it is settled — and actually, here’s to hoping it never settles! Ceaseless change in economics and life is a good thing.

But bureaucrats don’t see it that way. They want to freeze everything in place and make all things conform to their model. And if Sharis Pozen had her way, we would all be paying Netscape for the opportunity to surf the Web. So much for caring about the consumer.

[LFB]

Whatever good you have heard about The Hunger Games, the reality is more spectacular. Not only is this the literary phenom of our time, but the movie that created near pandemonium for a week from its opening is a lasting contribution to art and to the understanding of our world. It’s more real than we know.

In the story, a totalitarian and centralized state — it seems to be some kind of unelected autocracy — keeps a tight grip on its colonies to prevent a repeat of the rebellion that occurred some 75 years ago. They do this through the forced imposition of material deprivation, by unrelenting propaganda about the evil of disobedience to the interests of the nation-state and with “Hunger Games” as annual entertainment.

In this national drama and sport, and as a continuing penance for past sedition, the central state randomly selects two teens from each of the 12 districts and puts them into a fight-to-the-death match in the woods, one watched like a reality show by every resident. The districts are supposed to cheer for their representatives and hope that one of their selected teens will be the one person who prevails.

So amidst dazzling pageantry, media glitz and public hysteria, these 24 kids — who would otherwise be living normal lives — are sent to kill each other without mercy in a bloody zero-sum game. They are first transported to the opulent capitol city and wined, dined, and trained. Then the games begin.

At the very outset, many are killed on the spot in the struggle to grab weapons from a stockpile. From there, coalitions form among the groups, however temporary they may be. Everyone knows there can only be one winner in the end, but alliances — formed on the basis of class, race, personality, etc. — can provide a temporary level of protection.

Watching all this take place is harrowing to say the least, but the public in the movie does watch as a type of reality television. This is the ultimate dog-eat-dog setting, in which life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” in the words of Thomas Hobbes. But it is also part of a game the kids are forced to play. This is not a state of nature. In real life, they wouldn’t have the need to kill or be killed. They wouldn’t see each other as enemies. They wouldn’t form into evolving factions for self-protection.

The games provide that key element that every state, no matter how powerful or fearsome, absolutely must have: a means of distracting the public from the real enemy. Even this monstrous regime depends fundamentally on the compliance of the governed. No regime can put down a universal revolt. The plot twist in this story actually turns on a worry among the elites that the masses will not tolerate a scripted ending to the games this time.

So here we see the first element of political sophistication in this film. It taps into the observation first recorded by à‰tienne de La Boétie (1530-63) that all states, because they live parasitically off the population on an ongoing basis, depend on eliciting the compliance of the people in some degree; no state can survive a mass refusal to obey. This is why states must concoct public ideologies and various veneers to cover their rules (a point often raised by Hans-Hermann Hoppe in his work). “National traditions” such as the Hunger Games serve the purpose well.

The political sophistication of this film doesn’t stop there. The Hunger Games themselves serve as a microcosm of political elections in modern developed economies. Pressure groups and their representatives are thrown into a hazardous, vicious world in which coalitions form and reform. Survival is harrowing, and hate is unleashed as would never exist in normal life. Candidates fight to the death knowing that, in the end, there can only be one winner who will take home the prize.

Slight differences of opinion are insanely exaggerated to deepen the divide. Otherwise irrelevant opinions take on epic significance. Lies, smears, setups, intimidation, bribery, blackmail and graft are all part of a day’s work. All the while, the people watch and love the public spectacle, variously cheering and booing and rating the candidates and the groups they represent. Everyone seems oblivious as to the real purpose of the game.

And just as in The Hunger Games, democracy manufactures discord where none would exist in society. People don’t care if the person who sells them a cup of coffee in the morning is Mormon or Catholic, white or black, single or married, gay or straight, young or old, native or immigrant, drinker or teetotaler or anything else.

None of this matters in the course of life’s normal dealings with people. Through trade and cooperation, everyone helps everyone else achieve life aspirations. If someone different from you is your neighbor, you do your best to get along anyway. Whether at church, shopping, at the gym or health club, or just casually on the street, we work to find ways to be civil and cooperate.

But invite these same people into the political ring, and they become enemies. Why? Politics is not cooperative like the market; it is exploitative. The system is set up to threaten the identity and choices of others. Everyone must fight to survive and conquer. They must kill their opponents or be killed. So coalitions form, and constantly shifting alliances take shape. This is the world that the state — through its election machinery — throws us all into. It is our national sport. We cheer our guy and hope for the political death of the other guy.

The game makes people confused about the real enemy. The state is the institution that sets up and lives off these divisions. But people are distracted by the electoral and political mania. The blacks blame the whites, the men blame the women, the straights blame the gays, the poor blame the rich, and so on in an infinite number of possible ways.

The end result of this is destruction for us but continuing life for the Gamemakers.

And of course, in both elections and Hunger Games, there is a vast commercial side to the event: media figures, lobbyists, trainers, sign makers, convention-hall owners, hotels, food and drink businesses, and everyone and anyone who can make a buck from feeding the exploitation.

In all these ways, this dystopian plot line illuminates our world. I’m not suggesting that this is the basis of the appeal, though its uses as political allegory are real enough. More disturbing is the possibility that the story suggests to young people today the limits of the life opportunities for the generation now in its teen years. They have a darker worldview than any in the postwar period.

If The Hunger Games helps this generation understand that the real problem is not their peers or parents or anyone other than the Gamemakers, maybe they, too, will plot a revolt. Democracy is, as Hans-Hermann Hoppe says, the god that failed. I’m told that we have to wait for the third film for that.

[LFB]

Editor’s Note: While I agree with Jeffrey Tucker’s characterization of statist democracy and politics, I argue in an article in Libertarian Papers, “Immanent Politics, Participatory Democracy, and the Pursuit of Eudaimonia,” that democracy and politics can and should be reconceived along non-statist lines. There is more to democracy than voting and electoral politics within a statist system; it, and genuine politics, is essentially about discourse and deliberation between free people in joint persuit of their own well-being. As with everything else, the state, as a monopolist institution through which people vie to impose their values on others by the threat or use of initiatory physical force, corrupts democracy and politics, perverting both their ends and their means.

So you want to see Hunger Games when it comes out on Thursday at midnight? It’s not likely that you will get the chance. Tickets in my community have been sold out for weeks. In fact, the first 10 showings of the film are sold out. This disappoints me greatly because it is one of the few teen flicks I’ve really wanted to see.

The whole phenomenon seems set to make the Harry Potter hysteria and the Twilight mania seem like warm-up acts. Ask around among teens, and you will hear this confirmed. This is a true example of mass frenzy. Actually, the whole thing seems like a modern “madness of crowds.” It’s “pandemonium,” as People magazine put it.

Both the plot line and the marketing genius have lessons for our time.

Based on a book by Suzanne Collins that came out in 2008, the film tells the story of an impoverished, totalitarian society in which rebellion among the subjects is punished by the creation of a killing game for mass entertainment. A teenage girl is put in the position to kill or be killed, but she cleverly plots to stand up to the regime by cooperating with her opponent. Together, they win the hearts of the crowd and bring the regime to its knees.

In other words, it is a story about personal freedom against a powerful state, a tale of courage and defiance in the face of power. The reviews by actual readers (versus professional critics) are over the top. It’s Amazon’s No. 1, and it has 4,000 reviews and counting. This is a phenom.

Aside from the plot line, there is something contemporary about the theme of sheer deprivation and survival. It sums up the way young people are looking at the opportunities they are being presented in these times. We aren’t playing hunger games yet, but when an entire generation is pretty sure that it will not fare as well as its parents’ generation, that’s not good. Life seems like the zero-sum game posited in the film.

The marketing guru behind the push — and don’t kid yourself, for everything needs marketing — is Tim Palen. He began his work three years ago. He used social media to the max. He had video and smartphone app games created. He tweeted constantly. He made puzzles based on finding pieces within Twitter. He worked on amazing posters and pushes of every sort. Not one day went by when he and his staff weren’t pushing some button. (He is also likely to lose his job after this but that’s another story.)

But here’s another thing to know about this. There is no point in marketing — and it certainly doesn’t work over the long haul — if the essential product isn’t good. You have to have both: good selling technique and something good to sell. Only then does the magic happen.

A number of media outlets have examined his strategy, and it is fascinating to see how it all unfolded, all based on the idea that this movie would work only if users themselves were empowered to spread the word. The experts and insiders were kept at bay. The kids were the targets, and they were the ones that the producers relied upon to make this happen. Such is the way stuff works in the digital age. The guys in the boardroom matter only once they figure out that they need to reach the kid on the street.

But in all the marketing roundups I’ve seen, I’ve seen no mention of what might in fact be the central thing that made this book and movie take flight. It came to me in talking to teens themselves. I asked many: Where did you read the book? The answer comes immediately: online. Online? How is that possible? I thought we were living in times when piracy was punished by death or something close to it.

Well, try this for yourself. I searched for “Hunger Games free online.” In about one second, I had access to the full text for all the books, in every format: PDF, doc, txt, rtf, html, and epub. Even audio. It is amazing. And following all these links I see search engines posting notes about how they have taken down many links based on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. What this means is that there is at least some perfunctory effort to keep these books offline.

It’s not working. And thank goodness. These kids have become wild for this book and therefore dedicated to seeing the move, buying the shirts, and otherwise doing the whole teen-mania thing. True, the books are selling but, let’s face it, not every parent is willing to shell out money for their young teens to buy books about kids killing kids in a dark, dystopian world.

I’m speculating here but I suspect that a major reason for the insane success of these books and movies — easily the most spectacular teen freak out of our time — is that dread thing called piracy. That’s right, piracy. Except that it is not stealing to read something online. It takes nothing away from anyone. No physical property is stolen. Intellectual property is being shared, copied, duplicated, multiplied.

But wait just a minute. Isn’t the whole energy of the leviathan state swinging in to gear to stop this very thing, all in the name of saving private enterprise, even though the most successful book of our time is universally pirated like few things I’ve ever seen? That’s exactly right. And therein rests the amazing perversity of all this anti-piracy mania. The state is seeking to shut down the sharing of information, the very source that has given life to so much enterprise in our time.

Some authors are figuring this out. The remarkably successful writer Paulo Coelho writes on his blog: “As an author, I should be defending ‘intellectual property’, but I’m not. Pirates of the world, unite and pirate everything I’ve ever written! The good old days, when each idea had an owner, are gone forever.” You see, as a writer, he believes in ideas and he believes in his work and wants it to achieve a universal destination. He has also noticed that the more people read him, the more money he makes.

So get with it, writers and producers and publishers. Look at this case as just another one among thousands. Piracy is your friend. Only second-rate writers and publishers are hip to this idea of enlisting the state to crack down on people’s desire to know more. You can’t succeed through blackmailing people to buy infinitely copyable products. Successful enterprise comes from giving people want they want, enticing the imagination, and finding ways to profit from people’s desires. You can’t achieve that by stringing people up.

Hunger Games has so much to teach the world: the power of the individual, the evil of the state, the wickedness of the zero-sum game. Maybe it can also teach us that a major initiative by the state today to end Internet piracy is also rooted in fallacy. Sharing information is not a zero-sum game; it is a market process, a joyful area of play in which everyone can win.

[LFB]

Anyone who read Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax as a kid might dread the movie version. No one really needs another moralizing, hectoring lecture from environmentalists on the need to save the trees from extinction, especially since that once-fashionable cause seems ridiculously overwrought today. There is no shortage of trees and this is due not to nationalization so much as the privatization and cultivation of forest land.

And yet, even so, the movie is stunning and beautiful in every way, with a message that taps into something important, something with economic and political relevance for us today. In fact, the movie improves on the book with the important addition of “Thneed-Ville,” a community of people who live in a completely artificial world lorded over by a mayor who also owns the monopoly on oxygen.

This complicates the relatively simple narrative of the book, which offers a story of a depleted environment that doesn’t actually make much sense. The original posits an entrepreneur who discovers that he can make a “Thneed” — a kind of all-purpose cloth — out of the tufts of the “Truffula Tree,” and that this product is highly marketable.

Now, in real life, any capitalist in this setting would know exactly what to do: immediately get to work planting and cultivating more Truffula trees. This is essential capital that makes the business possible and sustainable through time. You want more rather than less capital. An egg producer doesn’t kill his chickens; he breeds more. But in the book (and the movie), the capitalist does the opposite. He cuts down all the trees and, surprise, his business goes bust.

The book ends with the aging capitalist regretting his life and passing on the last Truffula seed to the next generation. The end. However, the movie introduces us to the town that is founded after this depletion occurs. It is shielded off from the poisoned and depleted world outside, and oxygen is pumped in by the mayor who holds the monopoly on air and builds Lenin-like statues to himself. The people eventually rise up when they discover that “air is free” and thereby overthrow the despot, chopping off the statue’s head.

It was this line about how air is free that clued me in to the movie’s possible subtext. You only need to add one metaphor to see how this movie can be the most important and relevant political-economic drama of the season.

The metaphorical substitution is this: The Trees are Ideas.

Now, the action really begins. You can even see that the dazzling tufts of the trees look like how we might imagine that an idea looks. It is puffy, colorful, silky, and has the scent of “butterfly milk.” And of course the tufts are the essential capital that makes the business possible. The Thneed from which the tufts/ideas are made is useful for anything from wearing as a hat to functioning as a hammock. It’s sheer flexibility adds to the allegorical flavor.

Of course the trees are renewable just like ideas. You can draw from them but you dare not forcibly prevent access to them, much less kill them. And yet every time the axe slices through the trunk, the ideas are rendered non-renewable. The axes represent the state’s laws that introduce artificial scarcity into the non-scarce realm of ideas. Do this enough — and private businesses use the government’s laws to do this all the time these days — and you kill what gave rise to the business in the first place.

And in this case, the cooperation of the capitalists makes total sense. When a business uses “intellectual property” law to forcibly monopolize an idea — Apple’s touch screen, big pharma’s medicine formulas, a tune recorded by an industry mogul, a story printed by a big publisher — it is killing that idea for others to learn from and use. The idea is made non-renewable for a period of time dictated by the government. This introduces a propensity toward economic stagnation and decline. It might seem to make sense in the short run but in the long run, everyone suffers.

This is exactly what we see in the real world. Industries that are not cutting down the trees of ideas are flourishing. Fashion is innovative and dynamic. The cooking world shares recipes and techniques. The open-source software movement is innovating every day. In contrast, industries where IP is dominant have a tendency toward monopolization and stagnation: pharmaceuticals, proprietary software, old-line publishers, for example. It is especially interesting to remember that one of the most controversial and hated monopolies of our time happens to be Monsanto’s patents on seeds.

In the movie, the results are put on display in the most compelling way. The town of Thneed-ville is stagnant. Nothing is growing, nothing is changing, nothing is truly alive. It is frozen and fixed, cartelized by a single mogul who provides everyone that essential thing: air. Tellingly, there is total unity between the owner of air and the state. It is the ultimate corporate state, and it has bamboozled everyone into thinking that this is just the way the world is supposed to work. They know of no better way.

This situation changes when a young boy discovers the truth about what happened to ideas. He finds out that they were once plentiful and provided all the life and energy that society needs to thrive and grow. He is given a single seed to a Truffula tree — and it represents the hope that the world of ideas could again come to exist and inspire the recreation of a thriving, dynamic, progressive, growing society.

So of course the mayor has to steal the seed that represents hope for ideas again. A massive chase ensues, and, in the course of it, the boy breaks down the wall between Thneedville and the darkness outside. It is enough for people to discover that air is not scarce but rather belongs to everyone. They begin to turn on the mayor and sing a great song and dance a dance in complete defiance.

As in real life, once the ruler has lost the confidence of his subjects, his rule is over. The seed is planted right in the middle of town, and the air monopoly is ended. Eventually the beauty and life of the world is restored.

There are wonderful lessons to this movie if rendered in this metaphorical way. Look at what we are doing to ourselves with the imposition and enforcement of the gigantic thicket of “intellectual property” that is taking over the world. It is like a huge thicket of thorns, and we can hardly move without getting stuck and stabbed. It is transforming the nature of the market, which needs ideas as we need oxygen, from a world of free exploration into one with billions of invisible cages. This is slowing down progress, killing creativity, monopolizing production in the hands of the rich and powerful, and even threatening the digital age itself.

The lesson is summed up in the incredibly inspiring anthem at the end:

We say let it grow
Let it grow
Let it grow
You can’t reap what you don’t sow
It’s just one tiny seed
But it’s all we really need
It’s time to banish all your greed
Imagine Thneedville flowered and treed
Let this be our solemn creed
We say let it grow

[LFB & C4SIF]

The current generation might imagine that the egregious overreaching of the state in the name of security is something new, perhaps beginning after 9/11. The film shows that the roots stretch back to 1919, with Hoover’s position at the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation under attorney general A. Mitchell Palmer. Here we see the onset of the preconditions that made possible the American leviathan.

Palmer had been personally targeted in a series of bomb attacks launched by communist-anarchists who were pursuing vendettas for the government’s treatment of political dissidents during the first world war. These bombings unleashed the first great “red scare” in American history and furnished the pretext for a gigantic increase in federal power in the name of providing security. In a nationwide sweep, more than 60,000 people were targeted, 10,000 arrested, 3,500 were detained, and 556 people were deported. The Washington Post editorial page approved: “There is no time to waste on hairsplitting over infringement of liberties.”

Here we have the model for how the government grows. The government stirs up some extremists, who then respond, thereby providing the excuse the government needs for more gaining more power over everyone’s lives. The people in power use the language of security but what’s really going on here is all about the power, prestige, and ultimate safety of the governing elite, who rightly assume that they are ones in the cross hairs. Meanwhile, in the culture of fear that grips the country – fear of both public and private violence – official organs of opinion feel compelled to go along, while most everyone else remains quiet and lets it all happen.

The remarkable thing about the life of Hoover is his longevity in power at every step of the way. With every new frenzy, every shift in the political wind, every new high profile case, he was able to use the events of the day to successfully argue for eliminating the traditional limits on federal police power. One by one the limitations fell, allowing him to build his empire of spying, intimidation, and violence, regardless of who happened to be the president at the time.

There is a startling scene from 1932 surrounding what H.L. Mencken called the “biggest story since the resurrection”: the kidnapping of the child of Charles Lindbergh. When the federal agents showed up at Lindbergh’s house, they are treated as interlopers without any authority over the matter. The New Jersey police had the relevant jurisdiction here. Hoover fumed about this event and used it as the pretext to demand wider authority. The eventual result was to make kidnapping a federal crime, thereby setting a precedent for the eventual federalization of any and all crime. Today there is essentially nothing outside the jurisdiction of the feds.

(As a side note, making a brief appearance in the film is the role of FDR’s gold confiscation in the course of the investigation. The ransom was paid in gold certificates, which FDR had ordered be surrendered by federal criminal law by May 1933. The spending of these notes after this date is what tipped off merchants about possible criminal activity.)

World War II furnished more fodder for Hoover’s march toward total power. The Cold War was next. The civil rights movement and antiwar movements were next. At each stage, Hoover was able to regain his reappointment through a subtle blackmailing of each new president and whipping up of public hysteria based on the latest headlines about criminal activity and the need for federal intervention and control.

Was Hoover popular in the public mind? According to the movie, his popularity ebbed and flowed but mostly ebbed. This bothered him but it hardly mattered. He and his policies were never subjected to a plebiscite though he exercised incredible power as the head of an agency that had more in common with the Gestapo or the Stasi than anything ever envisioned by the 18th century liberals who shepherded America into existence.

Most interesting is the subtle psychological portrait of what kind of person seeks and keeps this kind of power, and what power does to this kind of person. It is a frightening feedback loop at work here. The worst get on top, as Hayek says, but the top makes the worst people even more corrupt than they would otherwise be.

The powerful man truly imagines that there is no real distinction between his personal interest and the interest of the cause he imagines himself to represent. He talks effortlessly about his own desires and and the desires of the people he imagines himself serving; they are one and the same. At the same time, these people can easily rationalize their own personal corruptions and private indiscretions as small and much-deserved rewards for their personal sacrifices.

Most telling are the final stages of the film where Hoover is growing ever more obviously old and feeble, but he, like all people who have held the golden ring too long, is tempted by the fantasy of earthly immortality. He cannot and will not see the end. And his dreams of holding on forever are assisted by a doctor who keeps him constantly full of medications designed to preserve his life as long as possible.

Even until the very end, people feared him, mainly because of the private files on powerful people that he is rumored to have kept in his office. But did he still control the world he created? That is unclear. He created and built an security-state empire and he continued showing up for work every day, and there is no question that he imagined that the fate of the world rested in his hands.

Everyone saluted him and made the right noises in his direction. At the same time, he had only one feeble friend, no real colleagues at the agency, and freely told others that he can no longer trust anyone at the agency. He had died professionally long before his body finally expired. Tributes that followed his death were perfunctory and short lived.

When he died, he was no one’s hero. But the monstrosity he built lived on with unchallenged jurisdiction over the lives of all Americans. The pathologies of this man became the pathologies of the entire nation-state. For the young people who need a primer in the rise and corruption of the US central state in the 20th century, this film is worth a close viewing.

[TLS]

If you look at the makeup of the US Congress — which now has a 9% percent approval rating — or if you watch the Republican debates, you are not immediately inclined to label either the smart set.  In fact, you have to be a dim bulb to repeatedly say many of the things that seem necessary for electability. On the other hand, a certain amount of cleverness is obviously necessary to outwit the media and your opponents.

Which is it? Two films that explore the relationship between power and brains are Being There (1979) and Limitless (2011). The films came out thirty years apart but deal with the same issues. Being There suggests that being dumb as a chicken is a huge advantage for those who seek political success. Limitless suggests that politics is the inevitable trajectory of a person who is far more intelligent than everyone else. Which is more realistic?

I’ll state my own view up front: politics is a gigantic waste of brains. If a person really has a gift for high-level thought, almost any profession would be a greater betterment to society and probably more self-fulfilling in the long run. Whereas it was probably once true that the political life attracted some of the best and brightest, it no longer seems true at all today.

Being There is both hilarious and serious, worth sitting down with at least once every few election seasons. Peter Sellers and Shirley MacLaine star in this adaptation of a novel by Jerzy Kosinski about an illiterate and simple-minded man named Chance who happened to be in the right place at the right time. His utterances are few and most concern what he has done his entire life, which has been to tend one garden on one estate and otherwise watch television.

When his benefactor dies, he is turned loose on the world and is taken in by a wealthy and influential industrialist who is close to the US president. His new caretakers mishear his name and call him Chauncey Gardener, and they mistake his stupidity and space-cadet ways for discreetness and quiet dignity.

Wearing the right clothes borrowed from the attic of his old house, and otherwise seeming to hold himself well and convey the right messages, Chauncey inadvertently leads everyone around him to think he is brilliant, well connected, a great lover, a worthy successor to the great men of our time, and, in the end, is even considered for president.

When he does speak, it is about the only thing he knows, which is gardening. People around him imagine that he is speaking in high-level metaphors. This happens in private and even on national television. He rises to such social heights that he is beyond negative judgment. The only person who knows the truth decides not to reveal it because to do so would be such a crushing blow to people he loves.

Unrealistic? Not so much. The only reason we tolerate the blather from the political class at all is entirely due to power and position of its members. If you put the same thoughts and ideas in the mouth of your neighbor, you would find him tedious, annoying, and largely deluded.

You can try an experiment using C-SPAN. Watch any random subcommittee hearing sometime and replace the faces you see by imagining the same said by the clerk at the convenience store or the worker laying asphalt in a new subdivision. Only then do you fully realize: the real talent of these clueless people is the ability to fake it for extended periods.

Much of our perception of the relative weight of a person’s words is due to the significance of the person using them. How else can we explain how the chairman of the Federal Reserve gets away with giving several speeches and testimonies per week that consist of nothing but long strings of platitudes, buzzwords, and long-refuted fallacies?

And it is the same with every head of every main government agency. They only get away with this because the media play along, never really asking serious questions that deal with fundamental issues or call upon a serious use of brain power. The unstated rule among those covering Washington is to never challenge the stupidity of big government itself. This pertains in those political debates, in committee hearings, or in any press conference.

Being There has been popular for so long among smart film critics precisely because it seems to account for so many political successes. It was once said to apply perfectly to Ronald Reagan. I couldn’t say. All evidence suggests that it explains George W. Further, I’ve watched the presidency of Obama, and the Chauncey effect here is completely undeniable. The frenzy that once surrounded his presidency (but probably not so much anymore) was wildly out of proportion to the reality.

Being There is more of a commentary on those around Chauncey than Chauncey himself. He never really wanted all this attention and it was never clear that he even knew what was happening around him. He was a happy man just experiencing life as it came to him.

The trouble was that as soon as he entered society, he bumped into many needy people. An aging industrialist needed an heir, and he fit the bill. His wife needed a younger and similarly heroic new and virile husband. Match. The servants in the household needed a new and distinguished visitor, the media needed a star, the president needed an adviser without baggage, and finally the establishment needed a new president. Chauncey was there. He never wanted it, never sought it, but he was there.

The tendency to find vessels for our dreams and worship fakes of our own creation is a universal one. It happens in every sector of life. But no sector is more replete with this problem than politics. The entire show is based on fundamental myths.

The candidates talk about their “vision” for America as if one man can remake a country in his own image merely upon being sworn in. It is not possible and that’s fortunate for us. It is a despotic longing. And yet people cling to these visions as if this one person can somehow become a conduit for realizing all their likes and dislikes throughout the whole of society.

In this sense, every candidate is Chauncey Gardener — a complete fake that voters themselves construct as part of a national ritual. It is a ritual rooted in a lie that government is anything but what it is, which is an agency of force that enables us legally to steal from each other. Government is not wise, it is not compassionate, it is not a creator of anything. It is a stupid, clumsy, and malevolent agent of legal compulsion, and nothing more.

Limitless — starring Bradley Cooper and Robert Di Niro — turns the plot of Being There on its head. A failed and down-and-out novelist is given a drug that allows him dramatically heightened ability to think clearly and thoroughly. His IQ soars to four digits and, suddenly, he can make great use of every bit of data that resides in the recesses of his brain.

He turns his life around, finishes the novel in a few days, and it becomes a bestseller. He turns to stockpicking and becomes rich in a matter of days too. He is then recruited to mastermind the largest corporate merger in history. Eventually he turns to politics, and we are somehow led to believe that this is the culmination of his excursion into the realm of advanced thought. The plot is energized by the scarcity of the pills and his quest to find more.

One merit of this film is its focus on intelligence as the key to amazing life performance. As I thought about it, I realized that very few comic book heroes are known for their distinctive ability to think as the main source of their power. They have physical strength, the ability to fly, the capacity to stretch or freeze, x-ray vision, or whatever, but none are known for amazing intelligence alone. It’s usually the villains who are smart and they are always beaten in the end.

Kudos, then, for this film for recognizing that thinking is far more important in the scheme of things than power and might. This is an unusual message that speaks an important truth, and it is a rare thing to see this featured in a movie.

On the other hand, the film completely stumbles with this idea that someone in this position would naturally gravitate to becoming a senator. Anyone with a high-powered brain would likely steer clear of such a thing. If you could make millions in days of stock picking, outsmart every corporate attorney in the world, save lives through medical research, speak any language after hearing it once, and so on, that person would surely dedicate himself to being part of the flow of real life, not becoming a mime in the mythical world of politics, where they pretend to hold the world together through legislation and regulation while we pretend to believe in their ghastly “visions” for how we should manage our lives.

If everyone in government were like the smart guy in “Limitless” we should seriously fear for our lives. Fortunately for us, government is more like Being There in two respects: its power and ways attracts and retains people with neither vision nor distinctive intelligence, and, institutionally, it lacks the means finally to rule a world of seven billion people with their own ideas of how to conduct their lives.

[TLS]