Politics > Politics-USA > The Invisible Gnomes and the Invisible Hand: South Park and Libertarian Philosophy
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09 Feb 2007 12:19:53 PM |
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The Invisible Gnomes and the Invisible Hand: South Park and Libertarian Philosophy |
by Paul Cantor
by Paul Cantor
DIGG THIS
High Philosophy and Low Comedy
The critics of South Park - and they are legion - bitterly complain about
its relentless obscenity and potty humor. And they have a legitimate point.
But if one wanted to mount a high-minded defense of the show's low-minded
vulgarity, one might go all the way back to Plato (427-347 bce) to find a
link between philosophy and obscenity. Toward the end of his
dialogueSymposium, a young Athenian nobleman named Alcibiades offers a
striking image of the power of Socrates. He compares the philosopher's
speeches to a statue of the satyr Silenus, which is ugly on the outside but
which, when opened up, reveals a beautiful interior: "If you choose to
listen to Socrates' discourses you would feel them at first to be quite
ridiculous; on the outside they are clothed with such absurd words and
phrases. His talk is of pack-asses, smiths, cobblers, and tanners, so that
anyone inexpert and thoughtless might laugh his speeches to scorn. But when
these are opened, you will discover that they are the only speeches which
have any sense in them." [1]
These words characterize equally well the contrast between the vulgar
surface and the philosophical depth of the dialogue in which they are
spoken. The Symposium contains some of the most soaring and profound
philosophical speculations ever written. And yet in the middle of the
dialogue the comic poet Aristophanes comes down with a bad case of hiccoughs
that prevents him from speaking in turn. By the end of the dialogue, all the
characters except Socrates have consumed so much wine that they pass out in
a collective drunken stupor. In a dialogue about the spiritual and physical
dimensions of love, Plato suggests that, however philosophical we may wax in
our speeches, we remain creatures of the body and can never entirely escape
its crude bodily functions. In the way that the Symposium moves back and
forth between the ridiculous and the sublime, Plato seems to be making a
statement about philosophy - that it has something in common with low
comedy. Both philosophy and obscene humor fly in the face of conventional
opinion.
I'm not sure what Plato would have made of South Park, but his Silenus image
fits the show quite well. South Park is at one and the same time the most
vulgar and the most philosophical show ever to appear on television. Its
vulgarity is of course the first thing one notices about it, given its
obsession with farting, shitting, vomiting, and every other excretory
possibility. As Plato's dialogue suggests, it's all too easy to become
fixated on the vulgar and obscene surface of South Park, rejecting out of
hand a show that chose to make a Christmas icon out of a talking turd named
Mr. Hankey. But if one is patient with South Park, and gives the show the
benefit of the doubt, it turns out to be genuinely thought provoking, taking
up one serious issue after another, from environmentalism and animal rights
to assisted suicide and sexual harassment. And, as we shall see, the show
approaches all these issues from a distinct philosophical position, what is
known as libertarianism, the philosophy of freedom. I know of no television
program that has so consistently pursued a philosophical agenda, week after
week, season after season. If anything, the show can become too didactic,
with episodes often culminating in a character delivering a speech that
offers a surprisingly balanced and nuanced account of the issue at hand.
Plato's Symposium is useful for showing that vulgarity and philosophical
thought are not necessarily antithetical. Before dismissing South Park, we
should recall that some of the greatest comic writers - Aristophanes,
Chaucer, Rabelais, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Voltaire, Jonathan Swift -
plumbed the depths of obscenity even as they rose to the heights of
philosophical thought. The same intellectual courage that emboldened them to
defy conventional proprieties empowered them to reject conventional ideas
and break through the intellectual frontiers of their day. Without claiming
that South Park deserves to rank with such distinguished predecessors, I
will say that the show descends from a long tradition of comedy that ever
since ancient Athens has combined obscenity with philosophy. There are
almost as many fart jokes in Aristophanes' play The Clouds as there are in a
typical episode of The Terrance and Philip Show in South Park. In fact, in
the earliest dramatic representation of Socrates that has come down to us,
he is making fart jokes as he tries to explain to a dumb Athenian named
Strepsiades that thunder is a purely natural phenomenon and not the work of
the great god Zeus: "First think of the tiny fart that your intestines make.
Then consider the heavens: their infinite farting is thunder. For thunder
and farting are, in principle, one and the same." [2] Cartman couldn't have
said it better.
Speaking the Unspeakable
Those who condemn South Park for being offensive need to be reminded that
comedy is by its very nature offensive. It derives its energy from its
transgressive power, its ability to break taboos, to speak the unspeakable.
Comedians are always pushing the envelope, probing to see how much they can
get away with in violating the speech codes of their day. Comedy is a social
safety valve. We laugh precisely because the comedian momentarily liberates
us from the restrictions that conventional society imposes on us. We applaud
the comedian because he says right out in front of an audience what,
supposedly, nobody is allowed to say in public. Paradoxically, then, the
more permissive American society has become, the harder it has become to
write comedy. As censorship laws have been relaxed, and people have been
allowed to say and show almost anything in movies and television - above all
to deal with formerly taboo sexual material - comedy writers like the
creators of South Park, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, must have begun to
wonder if there was any way left to offend an audience.
The genius of Parker and Stone was to see that in our day a new frontier of
comic transgression has opened up because of the phenomenon known as
political correctness. Our age may have tried to dispense with the
conventional pieties of earlier generations, but it has developed new
pieties of its own. They may not look like the traditional pieties, but they
are enforced in the same old way, with social pressures and sometimes even
legal sanctions punishing people who dare to violate the new taboos. Many of
our colleges and universities today have speech codes, which seek to define
what can and cannot be said on campus, and in particular to prohibit
anything that might be interpreted as demeaning someone because of his or
her race, religion, gender, handicap, and a whole series of other protected
categories. Sex may no longer be taboo in our society, but sexism now is.
Seinfeld was probably the first television comedy that systematically
violated the new taboos of political correctness. The show repeatedly made
fun of contemporary sensitivities about such issues as sexual orientation,
ethnic identity, feminism, and handicapped people. Seinfeld proved that
being politically incorrect can be hilariously funny in today's moral and
intellectual climate, and South Park was quick to follow its lead.
The show has mercilessly satirized all forms of political correctness -
anti-hate crime legislation, tolerance indoctrination in the schools,
Hollywood do-gooding of all kinds, including environmentalism and
anti-smoking campaigns, the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Special
Olympics - the list goes on and on. It's hard to single out the most
politically incorrect moment in the history of South Park, but I'll nominate
the spectacular "cripple fight" in the fifth season episode of that name -
and indeed just look at the politically incorrect name to describe what
happens when two "differently abled," or rather "handi-capable" boys named
Timmy and Jimmy square off for a violent - and interminable - battle in the
streets of South Park. The show obviously relishes the sheer shock value of
moments such as this. But more is going on here than transgressing the
boundaries of good taste just for transgression's sake. This is where the
philosophy of libertarianism enters the picture in South Park. The show
criticizes political correctness in the name of freedom.
A Plague on Both Your Houses
That is why South Park is in fact an equal opportunity satirist; it often
makes fun of the old pieties as well as the new, savaging both the right and
the left insofar as they both seek to restrict freedom. "Cripple Fight" is
an excellent example of the balance and evenhandedness of South Park, and
the way it can offend both ends of the political spectrum. The episode deals
in typical South Park fashion with a contemporary controversy, one that has
even made it into the courts: whether homosexuals should be allowed to lead
Boy Scout troops. The episode makes fun of the old-fashioned types in the
town who insist on denying a troop leadership to Big Gay Al (a recurrent
character whose name says it all). It turns out that the ostensibly straight
man the Boy Scouts choose to replace Big Gay Al is a real pedophile who
starts abusing the boys immediately by photographing them naked. As it
frequently does, South Park, even as it stereotypes homosexuals, displays
sympathy for them and their right to live their lives as they see fit. But
just as the episode seems to be simply taking the side of those who condemn
the Boy Scouts for homophobia, it swerves in an unexpected direction. Big
Gay Al himself defends the right of the Boy Scouts to exclude homosexuals on
the principle of freedom of association. An organization should be able to
set up its own rules and the law should not be able to impose society's
notions of political correctness on a private group. This episode represents
South Park at its best - looking at a complicated issue from both sides and
coming up with a judicious resolution of the issue. And the principle on
which the issue is resolved is freedom. As the episode shows, Big Gay Al
should be free to be homosexual, but the Boy Scouts should also be free as
an organization to make their own rules and exclude him from a leadership
post if they want to.
Nothing could be more calculated to make South Park offensive to the
politically correct than this libertarianism, for if applied consistently it
would dismantle the whole apparatus of speech control and thought
manipulation that do-gooders have tried to construct to protect their
favored minorities. Libertarianism is a philosophy of radical freedom, and
particularly celebrates the free market as a form of social organization. As
a philosophy, it descends from the thinking of the Scottish Enlightenment in
the eighteenth-century, social philosophers such as Adam Smith (1723-90),
who argued for free trade and the reduction of government intervention in
the economy. Libertarianism is especially grounded in the work of the
Austrian School of economics, and above all the writings of Ludwig von Mises
(1881-1973) and Friedrich Hayek (1899-1992), who offer the most
uncompromising defense of unfettered economic activity as the key to
prosperity and progress. [3] The word libertarianism was popularized by
Murray Rothbard (1926-95), a student of Mises, who developed the most
radical critique of state interference in economic and social life - a
philosophy of freedom that borders on anarchism. [4]
With its support for unconditional freedom in all areas of life,
libertarianism defies categorization in terms of the standard
one-dimensional political spectrum of right and left. In opposition to the
collectivist and anti-capitalist vision of the left, libertarians reject all
forms of economic planning and want people to be left alone to pursue their
self-interest as they see fit. But in contrast to conservatives,
libertarians also oppose social legislation, and generally favor the
legalization of drugs and the abolition of all censorship and
anti-pornography laws. Parker and Stone have publicly identified themselves
as libertarians, which might explain why their show ends up offending both
liberals and conservatives. As Parker has said: "We avoid extremes but we
hate liberals more than conservatives, and we hate them." [5] This does seem
to be an accurate assessment of the leanings of the show - even though it is
no friend of the right, South Park is more likely to go after leftwing
causes.
Defending the Undefendable
Thus the libertarianism of Parker and Stone places them at odds with the
intellectual establishment of contemporary America. In the academic world,
much of the media, and a large part of the entertainment business,
especially the Hollywood elite, anti-capitalist views generally prevail. [6]
Studies have shown that businessmen are usually portrayed in an unfavorable
light in movies and television. [7] South Park takes particular delight in
skewering the Hollywood stars who exploit their celebrity to conduct liberal
or leftwing campaigns against the workings of the free market (Barbra
Streisand, Rob Reiner, Sally Struthers, and George Clooney are among the
celebrities the show has pilloried). Nothing is more distinctive about South
Park than its willingness to celebrate the free market, and even to come to
the defense of what is evidently the most hated institution in Hollywood,
the corporation. For example, in the episode "Die Hippie Die," Cartman
fights the countercultural forces that invade South Park and mindlessly
blame all the troubles of America on "the corporations."
Of all South Park episodes, "Gnomes" offers the most fully developed defense
of capitalism, and I will attempt a comprehensive interpretation of it in
order to demonstrate how genuinely intelligent and thoughtful the show can
be. Like the episode "Something Wall-Mart This Way Comes," "Gnomes" deals
with a common charge against the free market - that it allows large
corporations to drive small businesses into the ground, much to the
detriment of consumers. In "Gnomes" a national coffee chain called
Harbucks - an obvious reference to Starbucks - comes to South Park and tries
to buy out the local Tweek Bros. coffee shop. Mr. Tweek casts himself as the
hero of the story, a small business David battling a corporate Goliath. The
episode satirizes the cheap anti-capitalist rhetoric in which such conflicts
are usually formulated in contemporary America, with the small business
shown to be purely good and the giant corporation shown to be purely evil.
"Gnomes" systematically deconstructs this simplistic opposition.
In the conventional picture, the small businessman is presented as somehow
being a public servant, unconcerned with profits, simply a friend to his
customers, whereas the corporation is presented as greedy and uncaring,
doing nothing for the consumer. "Gnomes" shows instead that Mr. Tweek is
just as self-interested as any corporation, and he is in fact cannier in
promoting himself than Harbucks is. The Harbucks representative, John
Postem, is blunt and gruff, an utterly charmless man who thinks he can just
state the bare economic truth and get away with it: "Hey, this is a
capitalist country, pal - get used to it." The great irony of the episode is
that the supposedly sophisticated corporation completely mishandles public
relations, naïvely believing that the superiority of its product will be
enough to ensure its triumph in the marketplace.
The common charge against large corporations is that, with their financial
resources, they are able to exploit the power of advertising to put their
small rivals out of business. But in "Gnomes," Harbucks is no match for the
advertising savvy of Mr. Tweek. He cleverly turns his disadvantage into an
advantage, coming up with the perfect slogan in his circumstances: "Tweek
offers a simpler coffee for a simpler America." He thereby exploits his
underdog position as a small businessman, at the same time preying upon his
customers' nostalgia for an older and presumably simpler America. The
episode constantly dwells on the fact that Mr. Tweek is just as slick at
advertising as any corporation. He keeps launching into commercials for his
coffee, accompanied by soft guitar mood music and purple advertising prose;
his coffee is "special like an Arizona sunrise or a juniper wet with dew."
His son may be appalled by "the metaphors" (actually they're similes), but
Mr. Tweek knows just what will appeal to his nature-loving, yuppie
customers.
"Gnomes" thus undermines any notion that Mr. Tweek is morally superior to
the corporation he's fighting, and in fact the episode suggests that he may
be a good deal worse. Going over the top as it always does, South Park
reveals that the coffee shop owner has for years been overcaffeinating his
son Tweek (one of the regulars in the show) and is in fact responsible for
the boy's hypernervousness. Moreover, when faced with the threat from
Harbucks, Mr. Tweek seeks sympathy by declaring: "I may have to shut down
and sell my son Tweek into slavery." It sounds as if his greed exceeds
Harbucks'. But the worst thing about Mr. Tweek is that he's not content with
using his slick advertising to compete with Harbucks in a free market.
Instead, he goes after Harbucks politically, trying to enlist the government
on his side to prevent the national chain from coming to South Park.
"Gnomes" thus portrays the campaign against large corporations as just one
more sorry episode in the long history of businessmen seeking economic
protectionism - the kind of business/government alliance Adam Smith wrote
against in The Wealth of Nations. Far from the standard Marxist portrayal of
monopoly power as the inevitable result of free competition, South Park
shows that it results only when one business gets the government to
intervene on its behalf and restrict free entry into the marketplace.
The Town of South Park vs. Harbucks
Mr. Tweek gets his chance when he finds out that his son and the other boys
have been assigned to write a report on a current event. Offering to write
the paper for the children, he inveigles them into a topic very much in his
self-interest: "how large corporations take over little family-owned
businesses," or, more pointedly, "how the corporate machine is ruining
America." Kyle can barely get out the polysyllabic words when he delivers
the ghostwritten report in class: "As the voluminous corporate automaton
bulldozes its way ." This language obviously parodies the exaggerated and
overinflated anti-capitalist rhetoric of the contemporary left. But the
report is a big hit with local officials and soon, much to Mr. Tweek's
delight, the mayor is sponsoring Proposition 10, an ordinance that will ban
Harbucks from South Park.
In the debate over Prop 10, "Gnomes" portrays the way the media are biased
against capitalism and the way the public is manipulated into anti-business
attitudes. The boys are enlisted to argue for Prop 10 and the man from
Harbucks to argue against it. The presentation is slanted from the
beginning, when the moderator announces: "On my left, five innocent,
starry-eyed boys from Middle America" and "On my right, a big, fat, smelly
corporate guy from New York." Postem tries to make a rational argument,
grounded in principle: "This country is founded on free enterprise." But the
boys triumph in the debate with a somewhat less cogent argument, as Cartman
sagely proclaims: "This guy sucks *****." The television commercial in favor
of Prop 10 is no less fraudulent than the debate. Again, "Gnomes" points out
that anti-corporate advertising can be just as slick as corporate. In
particular, the episode shows that the left is willing to go to any length
in its anti-corporate crusade, exploiting children to tug at the
heartstrings of its target audience. In a wonderful parody of a liberal
political commercial, the boys are paraded out in a patriotic scene
featuring the American flag, while the "Battle Hymn of the Republic" plays
softly in the background. Meanwhile, the announcer solemnly intones: "Prop
10 is about children. Vote yes on Prop 10 or else you hate children." The ad
is "paid for by Citizens for a Fair and Equal Way to Get Harbucks Out of
Town Forever." South Park loves to expose the illogic of liberal and
left-wing crusaders, and the anti-Harbucks campaign is filled with one
non-sequitur after another. Pushing the last of the liberal buttons, one
woman challenges the Harbucks representative: "How many Native Americans did
you slaughter to make that coffee?"
Prop 10 seems to be headed for an easy victory at the polls until the boys
encounter some friendly gnomes, who explain corporations to them. At the
last minute, in one of the most didactic of the South Park concluding
message scenes, the boys announce to the puzzled townspeople that they have
reversed their position on Prop 10. In the spirit of libertarianism, Kyle
proclaims something rarely heard on television outside of a John Stossel
report: "Big corporations are good. Because without big corporations we
wouldn't have things like cars and computers and canned soup." And Stan
comes to the defense of the dreaded Harbucks: "Even Harbucks started off as
a small, little business. But because it made such great coffee, and because
they ran their business so well, they managed to grow until they became the
corporate powerhouse it is today. And that is why we should all let Harbucks
stay."
At this point the townspeople do something remarkable - they stop listening
to all the political rhetoric and actually taste the rival coffees for
themselves. And they discover that Mrs. Tweek (who has been disgusted by her
husband's devious tactics) is telling the truth when she says: "Harbucks
Coffee got to where it is by being the best." Indeed, as one of the
townspeople observes: "It doesn't have that bland, raw sewage taste that
Tweek's coffee has." "Gnomes" ends by suggesting that it is only fair that
businesses battle it out, not in the political arena, but in the
marketplace, and let the best product win. Postem offers Mr. Tweek the job
of running the local franchise and everybody is happy. Politics is a
zero-sum, winner-take-all game, in which one business triumphs only by using
government power to eliminate a rival, but in the voluntary exchanges a free
market makes possible, all parties benefit from a transaction. Harbucks
makes its profit, and Mr. Tweek can continue earning a living without
selling his son into slavery, but above all the people of South Park get to
enjoy a better brand of coffee. [8] Contrary to the anti-corporate
propaganda normally coming out of Hollywood, South Park argues that, in the
absence of government intervention, corporations get where they are by
serving the public, not by exploiting it. As Ludwig von Mises makes the
point:
The profit system makes those men prosper who have succeeded in filling
the wants of the people in the best possible and cheapest way. Wealth can be
acquired only by serving the consumers. The capitalists lose their funds as
soon as they fail to invest them in those lines in which they satisfy best
the demands of the public. In a daily repeated plebiscite in which every
penny gives a right to vote the consumers determine who should own and run
the plants, shops and farms. [9]
The Great Gnome Mystery Solved
But what about the gnomes, who, after all, give the episode its title? Where
do they fit in? I never could understand how the subplot in "Gnomes" related
to the main plot until I was lecturing on the episode at a summer institute
and my colleague Michael Valdez Moses made a breakthrough that allowed us to
put together the episode as a whole. In the subplot, Tweek complains to
anybody who will listen that every night at 3:30 a.m. gnomes sneak into his
bedroom and steal his underpants. But nobody else can see this remarkable
phenomenon happening, not even when the other boys stay up late with Tweek
to observe it, not even when the emboldened gnomes start robbing underpants
in broad daylight in the mayor's office. We know two things about these
strange beings: they are gnomes and they are normally invisible. Both facts
point in the direction of capitalism. As in the phrase "gnomes of Zurich,"
which refers to bankers, gnomes are often associated with the world of
finance. In the first opera of Wagner's Ring Cycle, Das Rheingold, the gnome
Alberich serves as a symbol of the capitalist exploiter - and he forges the
Tarnhelm, a cap of invisibility. [10] The idea of invisibility calls to mind
Adam Smith's famous notion of the "invisible hand" that guides the free
market. [11]
In short, the underpants gnomes are an image of capitalism and the way it is
normally - and mistakenly - pictured by its opponents. The gnomes represent
the ordinary business activity that is always going on in plain sight of
everyone, but which they fail to notice and fail to understand. The people
of South Park are unaware that the ceaseless activity of large corporations
like Harbucks is necessary to provide them with all the goods they enjoy in
their daily lives. They take it for granted that the shelves of their
supermarkets will always be amply stocked with a wide variety of goods and
never appreciate all the capitalist entrepreneurs who make that abundance
possible.
What is worse, the ordinary citizens misinterpret capitalist activity as
theft. They focus only on what businessmen take from them - their money -
and forget about what they get in return, all the goods and services. Above
all, people have no understanding of the basic facts of economics and have
no idea of why businessmen deserve the profits they earn. Business is a
complete mystery to them - it seems to be a matter of gnomes sneaking around
in the shadows and mischievously heaping up piles of goods for no apparent
purpose. Friedrich Hayek noted this long-standing tendency to misinterpret
normal business activities as sinister:
Such distrust and fear have . led ordinary people . to regard trade . as
suspicious, inferior, dishonest, and contemptible . Activities that appear
to add to available wealth, "out of nothing," without physical creation and
by merely rearranging what already exists, stink of sorcery . That a mere
change of hands should lead to a gain in value to all participants, that it
need not mean gain to one at the expense of the others (or what has come to
be called exploitation), was and is nonetheless intuitively difficult to
grasp . Many people continue to find the mental feats associated with trade
easy to discount even when they do not attribute them to sorcery, or see
them as depending on trick or fraud or cunning deceit. [12]
Even the gnomes do not understand what they are doing. Perhaps South Park is
suggesting that the real problem is that businessmen themselves lack the
economic knowledge they would need to explain their activity to the public
and justify their profits. When the boys ask the gnomes to tell them about
corporations, all they can offer is this enigmatic diagram of the stages of
their business:
Phase 1 Phase 2 Phase 3
Collect Underpants ? Profit
This chart basically encapsulates the economic illiteracy of the American
public. They can see no connection between the activities businessmen
undertake and the profits they make. What businessmen actually contribute to
the economy is a big question mark to them. The fact that businessmen are
rewarded for taking risks, correctly anticipating consumer demands, and
efficiently financing, organizing, and managing production is lost on most
people. They would rather complain about the obscene profits of corporations
and condemn their power in the marketplace.
The "invisible hand" passage of Smith's Wealth of Nations reads like a gloss
on the "Gnomes" episode of South Park:
As every individual, therefore, endeavours as much as he can both to
employ his capital in the support of domestick industry, and so to direct
that industry that its produce may be of the greatest value; every
individual necessarily labours to render the annual revenue of the society
as great as he can. He genuinely, indeed, neither intends to promote the
publick interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. By preferring the
support of domestick to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own
security, and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may
be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this,
as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was
no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it
was no part of it. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that
of the society more effectively than when he really intends to promote it. I
have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the
publick good. [13]
The "Gnomes" episode of South Park exemplifies this idea of the "invisible
hand." The economy does not need to be guided by the very visible and heavy
hand of government regulation for the public interest to be served. Without
any central planning, the free market produces a prosperous economic order.
The free interaction of producers and consumers and the constant interplay
of supply and demand work so that people generally have access to the goods
they want. Like Adam Smith, Parker and Stone are deeply suspicious of people
who speak about the public good and condemn the private pursuit of profit.
As we see in the case of Mr. Tweek, such people are usually hypocrites,
pursuing their self-interest under the cover of championing the public
interest. And the much-maligned gnomes of the world, the corporations, while
openly pursuing their own profit, end up serving the public interest by
providing the goods and services people really want. In this rational
justification of the free market, South Park embodies the spirit of
libertarian philosophy and challenges the anti-capitalist mentality of much
of Hollywood. Gnomes of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your
bad image.
Notes
[1] Plato, Symposium, trans. by W.R.M. Lamb, in Plato: Lysis, Symposium,
Gorgias (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1925), p. 239.
[2] Aristophanes, The Clouds, trans. by William Arrowsmith (New York: New
American Library, 1962), p. 45.
[3] Mises' most famous book is Human Action: A Treatise on Economics (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1949) and Hayek's is The Road to Serfdom
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944).
[4] Rothbard articulates his libertarian philosophy most fully in The Ethics
of Liberty (New York: New York University Press, 2002) and For a New
Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto (New York: Macmillan, 1978). Perhaps the
clearest introduction to the economic principles underlying libertarianism
is Henry Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson (San Francisco: Laissez Faire
Books, 1996), originally published in 1946.
[5] As quoted in Brian C. Anderson, South Park Conservatives: The Revolt
Against Liberal Media Bias (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2005), p. 178.
[6] For an analysis of why such groups turn against capitalism, see Ludwig
von Mises, The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality (Princeton, NJ: D. Van Nostrand,
1956) and especially pp. 30-3 for the turn against capitalism in Hollywood.
[7] A perfect example of Hollywood's negative portrayal of businessmen is
the cruel banker Mr. Potter in the classic It's a Wonderful Life (dir. Frank
Capra, 1946). For a comprehensive survey of the portrayal of businessmen in
American popular culture, see the chapter "The culture industry's
representation of business" in Don Lavoie and Emily Chamlee-Wright, Culture
and Enterprise: The Development, Representation and Morality of Business
(London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 80-103. Here are some representative figures
from media studies: "Of all the antagonists studied in over 30 years of
programming, businessmen were twice as likely to play the role of antagonist
than any other identifiable occupation. Business characters are nearly three
times as likely to be criminals, relative to other occupations on
television. They represent 12 percent of all characters in identifiable
occupations, but account for 32 percent of crimes. Forty-four percent of all
vice crimes such as prostitution and drug trafficking committed on
television, and 40 percent of TV murders, are perpetrated by business
people" (p. 84).
[8] Not being a coffee drinker myself, I cannot comment on the question of
whether Starbucks is actually better than any particular local brew. I am
simply presenting the situation as it is laid out in "Gnomes," but I realize
that the issue of Starbucks coffee is controversial. In fact, no episode of
South Park I have taught has raised as much raw passion, indignation, and
hostility among students as "Gnomes" has. I'm not sure why, but I think it
has something to do with the defensiveness of elitists confronted with their
own elitism. What many intellectuals hold against capitalism is precisely
the fact that it has made available to the masses luxuries formerly reserved
to an elite, including their double lattes. I have heard every tired
argument against capitalism raised with regard to Starbucks, including the
old canard that the company lowers prices to drive out the local competition
with the aim of then raising prices once it has a monopoly. Since the
barriers to entry in the coffee business are very low, of course Starbucks
has never reached that monopoly position and never will.
[9] Mises, Anti-Capitalistic Mentality, p. 2.
[10] George Bernard Shaw offers this interpretation of Alberich; see his The
Perfect Wagnerite (1898) in George Bernard Shaw, Major Critical Essays
(London: Penguin, 1986), pp. 198, 205.
[11] For the way H.G. Wells uses invisibility as a symbol of capitalism, see
my essay "The Invisible Man and the Invisible Hand: H.G. Wells's Critique of
Capitalism," American Scholar 68 (1999), pp. 89-102.
[12] F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1988), pp. 90, 91, 93.
[13] Adam Smith, An Enquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of
Nations (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1981), p. 456.
December 4, 2006
Paul A. Cantor [send him mail] is Professor of English at the University of
Virginia and author of Gilligan Unbound: Pop Culture in the Age of
Globalization.Hear and see him on Mises Media.
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| User: "" |
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| Title: Re: The Invisible Gnomes and the Invisible Hand: South Park and Libertarian Philosophy |
14 Feb 2007 01:28:51 PM |
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On Feb What many intellectuals hold against capitalism is precisely
the fact that it has made available to the masses luxuries formerly reserved
to an elite, including their double lattes. I have heard every tired
argument against capitalism raised with regard to Starbucks, including the
old canard that the company lowers prices to drive out the local competition
with the aim of then raising prices once it has a monopoly. Since the
barriers to entry in the coffee business are very low, of course Starbucks
has never reached that monopoly position and never will.
Personally, I disagree. The real beef that intellectuals have with
capitalism is the fact that the propaganda inherent in advertising
causes people to feel they need things that they actually do not need,
namely luxuries like Starbucks-brand coffee. This causes a massive
concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the true elitists,
businessmen who think that being richer than Croesus makes you a
better person and gives you the right to spend money so that
demagogues can be elected to office whose only reason for existing is
to increase the gap between the the rich businessmen and the rest of
the poorer individuals of society. The only way this can be prevented
is if the government steps in to take the ill gotten gains of
businesses away thrugh tariffs and taxes, so that the kleptocratic
corporatocracy and the bureaucratic ochlocracy can be kept at bay, and
the rest of society can be helped to breathe through a system of
enforced wealth distribution.
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