As an early Christmas gift to his readers, Iowahawk revives a holiday classic. Here’s the trailer:
GEORGE BAILEY
Well, now now now, Clem, sure a few kids drowned. But look at all the jobs it created down at the Potter Retractable Basketball Floor factory. And that’s my point. Now, see, down in Washington there’s a whole Senate full of regular guys like you and you, and me, and we represent thousands of places just like Bedford Falls. And all of those places want their own jobs and healthcare and retractable basketball courts. And it turns out all of this costs money, so we have to get, well, revenues…WOMAN #3
You mean taxes?GEORGE BAILEY
Well, yeah, Helen, if that’s how you want to put it. See, we put all those revenues in a, a, a, big pile there in Washington, and then we start making deals and such, to make sure we can all bring some home. Sometimes we run out, and have to make up for it with other fees…MAN #2
You mean taxes? Why don’t you get it from Old Man Potter?WOMAN #2
Yeah! Get it from Potter!GEORGE BAILEY
Now, now, I hate old man Potter just as much as the rest of you. Maybe more. He lives in that cold old mansion up there on Beacon Hill, while you’re getting laid off and trying to make ends meet. It just isn’t right, and that’s why I organized the big ACORN march against him last year. But I’m telling you, even if we confiscated every penny he has, we couldn’t pay for your free universal health care. That’s why we have to charge you for some of it, and make sure you don’t use too much. But don’t worry, I sent my top trade representative Uncle Billy over to China to get a payday loan for the rest.WOMAN #5
But won’t we have to pay them back?GEORGE BAILEY
Well, Marge, yeah, technically, but only until you’re all dead. After that it’ll just be your kids.MAN #4
Stop your malarkey, Bailey! Keep your ridiculous health care bill. We want our money back!
Potterville is looking better and better.
I’ve always wanted to see two alternative story lines in that movie. The first would be what Bedford Falls would have been like without someone like Potter pushing the economic levers. Probably just a rundown ghost town.
The second was ably recounted by SNL, where Uncle Billy remembers he left the money with Potter, and all the townspeople confront him and beat the crap out of him.
It’s really not either/or. Guys like Potter are contemptible and bad… but also desperately needed.
Is Dave Burge mixing metaphors (or movies) here?
Perhaps it should be called “A Wonderful Mr. Bailey Goes to Washington?”
Pottersville was actually a cooler town.
On that note, if you haven’t seen the Gen X version of It’s a Wonderful Life, you should. It runs by the name of Donnie Darko, but it’s actually the opposite of IAWL (much in the way that X-Files was the opposite of Scooby Doo).
Seriously, here is the bone of contention I have with the Jim’s and Chris’s and all of the other President Obama boosters on the blogs.
I Rand’s point of view as Libertarian, and Libertarianism (or liberty for that matters) has a moral value and a utilitarian value.
The moral value of Liberty in a nutshell is the Ayn Rand deal, of Howard Roarke arguing that he had the right to blow up his own building. Not everyone buys into the moral argument, although the Founding Fathers probably did, and Jim and Chris probably don’t.
The second defense of liberty is strictly utilitarian. The moral case against the Health Reform bill is “how dare anyone tell me I must be compelled to get health insurance — how I decide to look after myself is my own affair.” The utilitarian case against Health Reform is “we are so hosed, health care in America is going to be the mass government program, and we all know how that is going to turn out.”
Suppose the Singularity is really happening, that technology is advancing at such a break-neck pace that we don’t have to worry about material scarcity. Kind of like Star Trek TNG where Picard suggests that the Federation is a post-Capitalist system — if you have matter replicators, some means of generating limitless energy, or at least enough for FTL travel, perhaps having money becomes immaterial.
There is perhaps some indication of this in the incipient economic recovery. Stock prices are not yet at their highs, but companies seem to be making money hand over fist, even though they haven’t hired everyone back, or maybe because they haven’t hired everyone back. So maybe as industry keeps getting more and more productive, maybe only a small fraction of us need to do productive work, much as there are only a tiny number of farmers growing all our food, and the rest of us need to be kept employed in some kind of make-work.
So in one sense, if a small number of people are required to produce all of the goods and services that people need, perhaps that small number of people are indeed “the rich” whom we can tax, and we can spread all of what they produce throughout society, essentially taxing the rich to pay for everything.
So why not? For one thing, the Federation (at least on starships) seems to use energy on a scale we cannot begin to imagine, and this appears to be largely nuclear energy of some form or another, I don’t see giant PV panels sticking out the side of the Enterprise. Solar/wind power without nuclear seems to be driving us in the direction of the Amish instead of the Federation.
Is our population even sustainable living as the Amish? Dunno, with the low birth rates characteristic of Soviet-style socialism, doing in the oldies with the Death Panels, maybe genetic technology to make widespread draft animal ag doable again.
The problem with this theory is that global population is not static. As food and other resources become more available, the population increases until resources are scarce again, real estate being one of them. (In Star Trek, they deal with this reality by shovelling the surplus population to other habitable planets.) You’re faced with the added difficulty in that you cannot nakedly redistribute without disinsentivising production (exchanging for one’s finite lifespan to create material wealth). Eventually, something has to give and the next crisis war ignites — either through civil war or a necessary war of conquest.