Tyler Cowen has a brutal review of what looks to be an idiotic ant-capitalist documentary:
A few months ago I went back and tried to read some Ayn Rand. As Adam Wolfson has suggested recently in these pages, it wasn’t easy.1 I was put off by her lack of intellectual generosity. I read her claim that “collectivist savages” are too “concrete-bound” to realize that wealth must be produced. I read her polemic against the fools who focus on redistributing wealth rather than creating it. I read the claim that Western intellectuals are betraying the very heritage of their tradition because they refuse to think and to use their minds. I read that the very foundations of civilization are under threat. That’s pretty bracing stuff.
I can only report that The End of Poverty, narrated throughout by Martin Sheen, puts Ayn Rand back on the map as an accurate and indeed insightful cultural commentator. If you were to take the most overdone and most caricatured cocktail-party scenes from Atlas Shrugged, if you were to put the content of Rand’s “whiners” on the screen, mixed in with at least halfway competent production values, you would get something resembling The End of Poverty. If you ever thought that Rand’s 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.
“Narrated by Martin Sheen” would be the first clue.
My question for the Martin Sheens, Mike Farrells, Susan Saradons, et al, is always the same, simply worded query as always.
If YOU want ME to live a simpler, lower impact, lower cost, earth and people friendlier lifestyle, why don’t YOU lead the way?
When I read that the Hollywood Glitteratti is selling big mansions in Beverly Hills and Malibu for smaller earth friendlier houses in the valley, that they’re giving away half their MILLIONS to Guatemalan orphans, that they’re flying coach and NOT private G-5s, then maybe I’ll listen.
However, I am NOT holding my breath.
Well said, Steve.
I’ll believe there is a problem when the elites start living like there is a problem.
Even if they are mistaken, at least I could recognize sincerity.
It is said that she had an affair with Nathaniel Branden, but that both their spouses knew about it. She definitely subscribed to the view that one “shouldn’t,” else she would not have publicly castigated Branden for his own marital infidelity in an issue of her newsletter, The Objectivist, after she and he severed their relationship. Methinks that was a might hypocritical of her.