Inspired by The Day After Tomorrow
By Don Boudreaux on Film - Cafe Hayek
Suppose that a movie with exaggerations on a similar scale were made by a free-market enthusiast.
Roland Emmerich’s new film, The Day After Tomorrow, is being roundly panned by reviewers. See, for example, Stephen Hunter’s less than globally warm review in today’s Washington Post. This despite favorable reaction to the movie from Al Gore and various environmental groups – favorable reaction because the movie depicts colossal worldwide destruction and death brought on by violent weather and tidal waves allegedly sired by global warming.
Of course, the movie has no basis in fact or science. Even one of the movie’s admirers, Friends of the Earth Director Tony Juniper, concedes that <font color=blue>“the depiction of the science is exaggerated and at times misleading.”<font color=black> However, this realization does not prevent Mr. Juniper from avowing that “the scale of the threat and the underlying politics are all too true.”
Suppose that a movie with exaggerations on a similar scale were made by a free-market enthusiast. That movie might contain some of the following scenes:<font color=blue>
- A ten-cent increase in the federal minimum wage casts
millions of blacks and Hispanics into permanent
unemployment and despair; all of these unemployed women
scrape up pennies by offering themselves as prostitutes,
while all of the unemployed men swarm to the suburbs to
rape soccer-moms and then riot so violently in the cities
that the Empire State building, the U.S. Capitol, the
Sears Tower, and the Bank of America building all crash
violently to the ground, killing tens of thousands of
innocent civilians, including a kindly book-peddler
specializing in works by and about Ayn Rand.
- The top bracket of the federal income tax is raised to
99.5% and broadened to include all income earned above
$30,000 annually. The astonishingly stupid, ideologically
driven hate-the-rich politicians and their freshly
graduated-from-Harvard aides blithely ignore warnings that
tax revenue will plummet and, worse, that such tax rates
will impoverish the country; sure enough, within 48 hours,
80% of the workforce quits their jobs; a few lucky ones
move to Ireland or New Zealand, while many of the rest
scrape buy as prostitutes (male and female), others rape
every Georgetown hostess, and all riot so violently that
the Chrysler building, the Prudential Tower, the Gateway
Arch, and Mount Rushmore all crash violently to the
ground, killing tens of thousands more people, including a
saintly professor of economics who studied under Milton
Friedman.
- An unholy alliance between greedy but smart (and
subsidized) big chemical manufacturers and utterly doltish
but ideologically fevered environmentalists cajoles Uncle
Sam into banning all research on genetically modifying
crops in ways that make them naturally resistant to pests.
With this research halted by government, pesticides
produced by the heavily subsidized chemical companies (who
are also protected from foreign competition) pour into the
water supply, poisoning millions. Frightened out of their
minds, young mothers take to the streets en masse, rioting
so violently that the Peachtree Plaza Hotel, the Grand Old
Opry, the Superdome, and the Seattle Space Needle all
crash violently to the ground, killing tens of thousands,
including a brilliant young researcher who was just hours
away from discovering the cures for cancer, AIDS, and acne.
....<font color=black>
I’m confident that, should any such silly movie ever be made, no president of a market-oriented thinktank would say about it that <font color=blue>“the depiction of the economics is exaggerated and at times misleading, but the scale of the threat and the underlying politics are all too true.” <font color=black> |
