How to trash an anti-capitalist rant
Tyler Cowen is a great blogger in part because he understands nuance. A libertarian, he nevertheless has no detectable partisanship bias. He constantly tests his own assumptions. He rarely gets angry. He is happy to acknowledge good points by his opponents. But every now and then, equanimity and magnanimity must step aside for spleen and pique. Cowen trashes Phillipe Diaz's The End of Poverty. If Cowen's description is accurate, the film richly deserves it.
Blowhards everywhere take note: The critique is all the more powerful coming from someone who is not a chronic screamer. Some excerpts from his review:
If you ever thought that [Ayn] Rand’s [clueless lefty] nemeses were pure caricature, this film will show you that they are not (if the stalking presence of Naomi Klein has not already done so). If you are looking to benchmark this judgment, consider this: I would not say anything similar even about the movies of Michael Moore....In this movie, the causes of poverty are oppression and oppression alone. There is no recognition that poverty is the natural or default state of mankind and that a special set of conditions must come together for wealth to be produced. There is no discussion of what this formula for wealth might be. There is no recognition that the wealth of the West lies upon any foundations other than those of theft, exploitation and the oppression of literal or virtual colonies....
Diaz and company also fail when it comes to simple fact-checking. At about the one-hour twenty-three minute mark we are told that an expenditure of $20 billion would cut global poverty in half; this sum is then compared to the much larger U.S. military budget and the suggestion is that Americans are being greedy. You don’t need much calculation to see that this is nonsense. Under any plausible assumptions, this sum is less than $10 per poor person in the world....
In this light it is entirely appropriate that the producer of The End of Poverty, Beth Portello, previously worked for Nike and Adidas. I see nothing wrong with her having done so, but one would think Diaz and company would, given these companies’ well-known reputations for running sweatshops in poorer countries. I’m willing to state that those sweatshop jobs are better than the “natural economy” jobs they displaced, but are Diaz or Sheen? The Cinema Libre website tells us that Portello is “making amends” for her past, but in reality she is repeating it—except that now she is no longer giving poor people stable jobs at higher wages than they had before.
Comments
Awesome! Thanks for that.
Ayn Rand's shows how Selfishness is a Virtue. Many of her readers do not think this through, often experiencing a knee-jerk rejection of that moral view in favor of the deep seated Altruism with which they had grown up.
But selfishness is not the willy-nilly acquisitiveness of the hedonist, or drug user. To be one's Self, a person must pursue values that benefit him, properly. That does not mean satisfying just any material or intellectual desire.
As a biological being a person need certain material values to live comfortably (good food, shelter etc.) —the next fancy outfit, TV system, car, etc. are not necessarily smart values. Similarly, one needs certain sensible intellectual things by which one can be happy. One needs such intellectual values as knowledge,, art, good character and perhaps a lover. They must set long term goals to ensure they have the resources to obtain such values. Watching TV at the wrong times (something more important must be done) or for too long, becomes empty hedonism. If the free time is earned, then it may be a valid relaxation, or even a source of knowledge or an esthetic reward.
Rand has condensed such values to three primary values:
1. Values: “that for which one acts to gain or keep.”
a. Reason: as man’s only tool of knowledge [rejecting whim, intuition and prayer].
b. Purpose: the reasoned choice of happiness a person seeks to achieve.
c. Self Esteem: the earned certainty one can think, be happy, & deserves to live.
She also lists seven top virtues any person needs in order to live, and to live happily.
2. Virtues: the actions by which one gains or keeps values:
a. Productivity: since life takes effort, one must act productively.
b. Rationality: one must be committed to reason and logic, one’s primary tools of survival
c. Independence: thinking and acting for yourself, not simply relying on others.
d. Honesty: recognizing that the unreal is unreal.
e. Integrity: ensuring constant agreem’t between one's rational judgments and one’s actions.
f. Justice: never faking the character of a man, & treating him accordingly.
g. Pride: choosing & pursuing one’s own objective standards, and accepting the Self-Esteem earned by their achievement.
Selfishness is just as important for a Self to exist, as blue-ishness is necessary for something to be blue!
The opposite of selfishness is the morality of altruism —that is, self-sacrifice to others (the nation, the tribe, the Earth etc.) by force of law or by religious guilt. Altruism is the morality of the Socialist/Fascist Left and Conservative/Religious/Fascist Right. Fully practiced, altruism destroys one's Self. To convince others that altruism is the ideal morality, the two sides have their own rationalized philosophical arguments that undermine the very Values and Virtues any person needs, to live.
Posted by: Richard | April 21, 2009 1:22 PM
It is one thing to be selfish about things you personally have created from scratch.
It is quite another to be selfish about things which nature provides ... and to which all of us are equally entitled. When we privatize something of the latter category, just rules would have us compensate our fellow human beings for what we have taken.
Privatizing the commons and then crowing about being a self-made man doesn't cut it.
We can co-exist as equals, if we know what is rightly individual property, and what is rightly common property. When we confuse the two, we do our fellow human beings a huge injustice. We steal from them their birthright.
Posted by: LVTfan | April 21, 2009 5:39 PM
awesome. Had I known all that was needed was $10, I would have used the first ten bucks I ever made shoveling snow to pull myself out of poverty.
Instead, I had to go through this big long complicated process of working and education.
what a drag.
Posted by: Alan Brown | April 21, 2009 5:54 PM
I don't think you need to go to a movie to observe the kind of villains in Atlas Shrugged. All that is needed is to watch the news on TV. It doesn't matter much whether it is mainstream, CNN or FOX, neither the commentators nor the guests are speaking up for Capitalism today. Nobody advocates the gold system or free banking. No one mentions the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. There is no discussion as to whether people should be free to move about the Earth. Instead, we have these inane discussions about what to do with illegal immigrants. It is disgusting, and scary.
Posted by: JackDoitCrawford | April 22, 2009 8:18 AM
To LkVTfan above, would you care to describe specifically what you refer to as "Common". The only things we share in common other than our natural rights as men and women are:
(1)a military to property defend our shores, air space and shipping lanes (2)the courts to adjudicate disputes
(3)the cop on his beat
Other than that, anything can be privatized.
Posted by: Robert Taylor | April 26, 2009 9:48 PM
Our natural rights as men and women include our equal rights to the commons, which include land value, the airwaves, geosynchronous orbits, water, clean air, rush hour landing rights at busy airports, etc. The classical economists would recognize all these things as "land," though some of them were not known when Ricardo or George were writing. If you assume we are created equal, then the courts should exist to protect our equal rights, not the privilege of some of us to collect rent on land value and the requirement that the rest of us sow what we don't get to reap.
Posted by: LVTfan | May 5, 2009 9:52 PM