Hollywood Disconnect, Valuing ‘Equality’ More Than ‘Liberty’

July 9, 2012 | Filed under corruption,Culture Of Corruption,Democrats,Entertainment,Film,Liberals | Posted by

We are soon to be regaled by yet another movie from Hollyweird that likely misunderstands the difference between liberty (or freedom) and equality. This we might infer from the recently released advance plot synopsis for the upcoming movie Elysium from Director Neil Blomkamp, director of the surprise 2009 Sci Fi hit District 9.

Blomkamp’s new film is set in the not-too-distant future where the human elite live in a cushy space station circling the Earth while the rest of humanity toils down on the environmentally distressed Earth. In this film, the hero (played by Matt Damon, who else?) will battle to, according to the synopsis, “bring equality to these polarized worlds.”

In the year 2159 two classes of people exist: the very wealthy who live on a pristine man-made space station called Elysium, and the rest, who live on an overpopulated, ruined Earth. Secretary Rhodes (Jodie Foster), a hard line government official, will stop at nothing to enforce anti-immigration laws and preserve the luxurious lifestyle of the citizens of Elysium. That doesn’t stop the people of Earth from trying to get in, by any means they can. When unlucky Max (Matt Damon) is backed into a corner, he agrees to take on a daunting mission that if successful will not only save his life, but could bring equality to these polarized worlds.

Sounds like a typical Sci Fi dystopian plot, right? Well, yes, if by typical you mean morally muddled and confused. In fact, it is the same sort of confusion we get from Hollywood Sci Fi all the time.

Hollywood’s confusion comes in over the question of which system should be most valued as the best one for the humanity. With these films it becomes woefully obvious that Hollyweirders are obsessed with “equality” more than they are freedom!

We have a film plot of contrasts here. It’s a common tale of the “rich” (always defined as evil, uncaring, and selfish) against the “poor” (always the noble, but downtrodden reg’lar folks like you and me). But notice the reason the hero is the good guy here. He’s going to “bring equality” to the two worlds, you see? So, let’s think about this idea, shall we?

The “two worlds” are separated for a reason. The “rich” are living in luxury on the space station but their “world” is tightly controlled as to who can come and go. Why is this? Because, of course, their resources — while amazingly wealthy — are finite. They have to carefully guard what they have or they will lose it if their riches are given equally to all of humanity.

So, what would “equality” mean to those on the space station should our intrepid hero “bring” it to them? It would mean that their quality of life will be heavily degraded for certain.

Some are prone to say, “Good. Them darned ol’ Rich creeps deserve to be laid low.”

But what of the teeming millions on Earth? What will bringing the space station elites down mean to them? Sure they will feel a momentary high of satisfaction that the evil rich dudes on the space station have been brought down, but the lives of the poor will only marginally improve if they improve at all once the resources of the space station are distributed. In the end, equality does not mean that all can be upgraded to space station status, but that all would living a life of the lowest, most affordable common denominator. Everyone will share in the misery as opposed to sharing much of the luxury.

It’s a socialist fantasy of “equality” we see here, not a tale of freedom.

Is equality better than liberty, though? What is the best model for human life? Does a better concept exist? Is there a better moral idea?

Certainly we already have that best model of human existence identified. It’s called liberty.

The better idea would be not to bring down the evil rich to the lowest common denominator of human existence but to find a way to give every human an equal shot at living that space station life — if only metaphorically. This is a world based on liberty.

In a world of liberty everyone has the chance to make it according to his best abilities. Does it mean some people will achieve more than others? Sure. It is simply impossible to imagine every one person can be as excellent as the next. Some will do better than others simply because we are not all equal mentally and/or physically. It’s a simple matter of fact. But with liberty we all have a chance to achieve what we can. Thomas Jefferson called it, a “natural aristocracy of men.”

Unfortunately, liberty is squashed by a top down imposition of “equality” which, by its very nature, prevents each of us from achieving to the heights of our individual abilities. We each can achieve our personal best only if we have the liberty to strive for it. And this means “equality” is not only not possible, but not wanted.

Director Blomkamps first major film, District 9, was pretty good. So, here’s hoping he won’t fall into the typical Hollywood trap of imagining that “equality” is better than liberty.

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Posted by on July 9, 2012.
Filed under corruption, Culture Of Corruption, Democrats, Entertainment, Film, Liberals.
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago-based freelance writer, has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and is featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart's BigGovernment.com and BigJournalism.com, RightWingNews.com, CanadaFreePress.com, RightPundits.com, StoptheACLU.com, Human Events Magazine, among many, many others. Additionally, he has been a frequent guest on talk-radio programs to discuss his opinion editorials and current events.He has also written for several history magazines and appears in the new book "Americans on Politics, Policy and Pop Culture" which can be purchased on amazon.com. He is also the owner and operator of PubliusForum.com. Feel free to contact him with any comments or questions, EMAIL Warner Todd Huston: igcolonel .at. hotmail.com"The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it." --Samuel Johnson

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  • GarandFan

    So will Al Gore be playing himself?

  • retired.military

    Here let me beat Grumpy to the punch. Racism!!!!

  • herddog505

    The movie “In Time” has a very similar plot: the poor kid from the “poor district” plots to rob The Richest Man in the World and redistribute his wealth to everybody else. The Richest Man in the World, of course, lives in a heavily guarded, heavily segregated district.

    For that matter, “The Hunger Games” has a similar theme: the rich are VERY rich and live in isolated, extreme luxury, literally using the poor as sacrificial entertainment.

    I wonder if this isn’t a case of Hollywood feeling guilty: after all, the very rich in Hollywood live in gated communities, spend their considerable leisure time in vapid partying and conspicuous consumption (Johnny Depp apparently owns his own island, fer cryin’ out loud), and are basically parasites on the “poor” actors, screenwriters, crew, and public who make their lives of fantastic luxury possible.

    I also wonder if anybody has ever asked some of the A-listers, especially the outspoken lefties among them, if they think that they (unlike Mitt Romney, the Koch Brothers, etc.) really DESERVE their wealth. Somehow, I’m guessing nobody’s ever asked or, if they have, the answer has been an instant and unreserved “YES!”

    • http://www.facebook.com/people/Jack-Zimms/100003653414389 Jack Zimms

      The abusive powerful which are often rich have been the villain
      of many movies. That doesn’t mean that being rich is the same as being a
      abusive power or those who abuse power are necessary rich.

      In the hunger games you those who are in power abusing those
      who are not and forcing the less fortunate to commit offensive acts. The
      directors pulled it off and it showed at the box office. Many movies haven’t of
      late and it showed at the box office. Many of the plots of it is an big bad oil
      company so they are bad have worn thin. IMO that is why the comic book movies
      and similar ones have done much better than the Hollywood liberal morality ones.

  • Guest

    Equality doesn’t “prevent each of us from achieving to the heights of our individual abilities.” That is such a pathetically sad statement. Being equal provides an equal playing field and equal opportunities.

    In order for you to be successful, you don’t have to make sure that others don’t have an equal chance at success.

    Are you afraid you won’t succeed in a competitive setting where there is no advantage to being a white male? Seriously, Todd?

    That’s just pathetic.

    “We each can achieve our personal best only if we have the liberty to
    strive for it.”

    And helping others less fortunate than you doesn’t confine your liberty or prevent you from succeeding.

    Seriously. Maybe you just have some more growing up to do before you see that, but you don’t need to insure that some Americans fail in order for you to have a better chance of succeeding. With equality for all, we all have a chance, and your chances aren’t diminished in the least.

    • warnertoddhuston

      You really do have some sort of reading problem. No where did I decry “helping others.” But I would make an exception in your case.

    • http://wizbangblog.com/author/rodney-graves/ Rodney G. Graves

      DERP!

    • 914

      DERP! DERP!~

    • 914

      “Being equal provides an equal playing field and equal opportunities.”

      You are living in a delusional fantasy world. This is not so.

      “Maybe you just have some more growing up to do before you see that, but you don’t need to insure that some Americans fail in order for you to have a better chance of succeeding. ”

      Then why does Barack insist on a failing America as his road to success?

      Fool

    • jim_m

      The problem nitwit is that the left demands not equality of opportunity, we already have that, but equality of outcome. That is what is behind 0bama’s stupid comments to Joe the Plumber in 2008. That is what is behind Affirmative Action (although it didn’t start out that way it became so).

      The left defines equality of opportunity based on the equality of outcomes. The left erroneously assumes that if everyone has the same opportunity, then everyone will have the same success. This is not true and has never been true.

      redistribution of income and other left wing ideas are all about equality of outcomes. They are designed not to lift people up, because when you are moving everyone toward the average income whilst taking out a cut for the government what you end up doing is reducing the average and moving everyone toward that lower average. Redistribution is ultimately about making [people equal by making people poor. That is what equality is about to the left.

    • http://opinion.ak4mc.us/ McGehee

      Equality before the law is what provides opportunities — not “being” equal. Being equal means that after you’ve availed yourself of opportunities and made the most of them, somebody else who didn’t lift a finger gets to enjoy the fruits of your labors.

  • TomInCali

    Jesus Christ, Huston… it’s just a movie! And one you haven’t even seen yet, I might add.

  • Commander_Chico

    I think we can wait until the movie comes out to judge what the plot says.

    At least we agree District 9 was a pretty good movie. I gave it to an Afrikaner friend – he did not like it.

    On the general theme – history shows that too much inequality leads to loss of liberty – as those at the top have to oppress the rest to maintain their unfair share.

    • herddog505

      I disagree. I suggest, rather, that the converse is true: increasing liberty leads to less inequality. The middle class did not arise because a few poor people went to the nobility and demanded their “fair share”. To the contrary, it arose because the interaction between increasing economic power of “the poor” and political reform starting notably with Magna Carta gave the rising middle class the political power to get more and more liberty, which in turn gave them increasing access to wealth.

      A centralized government, intent on “redistributing” wealth, leads to what we’ve seen from the communist countries in the past century: subjugation, misery, and mass death.

      • Commander_Chico

        It’s a chicken-egg argument for the most part, or a French Revolution/American Revolution argument. Historical and local conditions vary. In a world where there are NO viable jobs for the less intelligent/less able, some redistribution is going to have to happen. I’m in favor of it, because I don’t want the state to have checkpoints, media control, and massive policing to check rampant crime, riots and rebellions, nor do I want to have to fight off those people with an M4 myself.

        The stats have been showing the middle class is going away in the USA for years. They no longer have the economic power you talk about.

        • herddog505

          What’s a “viable job”? If I need to put food on my table, digging ditches or washing dishes for twelve hours per day is a “viable job” if I get paid something for it. O’ course, the law makes it hard for those things to BE viable jobs: minimum wage laws mean that there are fewer jobs at the low end (suck to be young these days), and increasing mandates to provide this and that benefit drive employers to reduce staffs to the bone, go overseas, or go out of business entirely.

          I really don’t understand your apparent fear that “the poor” are suddenly going to go on rampages a la 1789 if we don’t pay them the danegeld. I realize that, thanks to Barry and libs generally, economic opportunity isn’t what many of us could wish, but I think we’re hardly in a position of having to worry about defending our homes from hoardes of starving, downtrodden proles.

          And if the middle class is “going away” (weird how one sees them everywhere), then why is this? Is there a correlation between the growth of Uncle Sugar – Uncle Sam’s check writin’, tax raisin’, business regulatin’ ne’er-do-well younger brother – and the decline of economic prosperity and opportunity in our country? Could it be that the mania for “equality” and “fairness” is having the effect of making more and more people equally poor and miserable?

          • Commander_Chico

            I am talking about having a place to live and being able to eat. That is viable.

            A full time minimum wage job pays $15,100 per year. And you think that is too high. Let’s say they work 365 days a year, 12 hours a day, that gets it up to $31,000. OK if you’re single and don’t care about anything else, I guess.

            The problem is that: (1) capital (in the form of equipment and their owners) now can do without labor in many cases, and when they can’t, (2) they can find cheap labor in other places in the world. This problem for Americans is increasing. Soon even the minimum wage jobs will be gone for those with low ability.

          • herddog505

            The use of machines to replace people is nothing new; it’s been going on for centuries. Yet, somehow, the human race stumbles on, magically increasing in number and longevity.

            Ditto “cheap labor”. I recall reading that, at one time, America was the land of cheap labor and cheap manufactured goods (oh, how the English hated that). The fact is that there are some goods that are (at least, we HOPE) so cheap that they cannot be made in a “first world” economy either extensive use of machines (and little actual labor) or made in such small quantities and at such high prices that they become a luxury item.

            If our jobs are going away, then we really need to ask ourselves why that is and what we ought to do about it. It seems to me that demanding that the remaining employers pay more and more in wages, taxes, and regulatory costs is NOT the way to keep jobs here.

          • Commander_Chico

            There are now less people in the USA employed in manufacturing than in January 1941 – prewar, end of the depression.

            Manufacturing jobs are good because they are highly productive in economic terms per worker. They produce a lot of value in an economy. Without those jobs, what’s left for the less able? Agriculture? Uh, no, it’s another highly automated sector, except for the fruit pickers, and even there the technologies are getting better. You end up with service jobs split among part-time positions (because no employer wants to pay benefits, preferring to shift the burden to the state).

            You are right that there will be downward pressure on wages, but again, when productivity per worker has been increasing, why? Obviously, if you don’t increase or decrease wages of workers who add more value, that value has to flow up to owners.

            Part of what I do is comparative regulatory analysis. The USA is not particularly burdensome and ranks high in the world in ease of doing business indexes like those of the World Bank and OECD. There is always room for improvement, but the USA is a pretty good place to do business in that regard, especially when you consider it’s not very corrupt in its regulatory enforcement and permiting processes and you can actually get contracts enforced. Ditto with taxes – not that bad, although I favor lower corporate taxes and more progressive individual taxes.

            The future is bleak – there are just no sources of jobs on the horizon for the great mass of Americans. If I’m wrong, you tell me where the 85 IQ 18 year old goes to work nowadays and has a prospect of a good living.

          • herddog505

            Manufacturing jobs are “good” only because, in recent memory, they’ve been rather high-paying thanks to unions and their pet politicians who’ve rigged the system so that one MUST pay $50 / hr to somebody to screw on hubcaps… or else go overseas. Let us recall that, a century or so ago, factory jobs were low-paying, moderately dangerous, and required long hours. In the early days of the industrial revolution, women and children worked in factories as they were cheaper to pay than men. A factory job was better than working a small farm, but it isn’t naturally high-paying.

            Are they good in terms of productivity per worker? Absolutely, thanks to machines and assembly line techniques that allow a low-skill (and, in some cases, low intelligence) worker to do enough useful labor such that his boss can “purchase” it at a price that still allows him to make a profit by selling what the employee produces for him.

            Why are manufacturing jobs going to Red China? Part of the answer is obvious: cheap(er) labor. Why, then, did those jobs not go twenty or fifty years ago? Politics aside, the Red Chinese had not developed the infrastructure to make it worthwhile: what does it profit me to move my business to another country if the money I save on cheaper labor is swallowed up by the costs of building a new plant from the ground up? In other words, the US factory worker has been living off the effects of the fact that we were among the first countries to industrialize AND the fact that, almost alone in the world, our industrial base wasn’t badly damaged by World War II: if one wanted to manufacture something, the US was really the only place to do it until about the 1960s or 1970s.

            So, how do we STOP manufacturing jobs going to Red China (or Japan, or Germany, or Mexico, or any of the other places they have gone or are likely to go)? The first step is getting past the idea that a factory job is or should be high-paying. Is working on an assembly line REALLY that much more difficult, does it REALLY require that much more skill or intelligence, than working in a kitchen or landscaping or any of those other jobs that “Americans won’t do”?

            The next step is making it favorable to do business here. If the US is relatively less constrained from a regulatory perspective than other countries, I suggest that (A) quite a few people seem hell-bent on changing that and (B) the difference is like that between being hit with a stick ten times instead of fifteen: yes, it’s better, but still sucks. As for taxes, why should ANYBODY want to do business in a place where the cost of labor is high, the cost of regulation is high, and taxes are high? What’s the advantage to manufacturing anything in the United States these days, barring crony capitalism and getting a generous (ahem) subsidy from the government to offset the money being lost to taxes, wages, and regulations?

            Nobody wants a return to the bad old days of child labor, sweatshops, and company towns, but we must realize that the business of America is business, or continue to see our jobs head elsewhere.

          • Commander_Chico

            In the hey-day of American manufacturing, GM and Ford were able to make a profit even as they paid their workers well.

            Just as you say there is no reason for manufacturing wages to be high, there is no reason for them to be low. Depending on the item being manufactured, labor adds a lot of value to the material being made into something more valuable. That is the value-added, or productivity. And if the value added is high, then yes, the manufacturing job should be “inherently good” and well paid. Even seamstresses in a sweatshop sewing dresses are adding huge value, particularly with quality products that sell at a premium or have a brand name (for an examination of this from another angle, read the book Gomorrah about the operation of knock-off sweatshops in southern Italy).

            It is just a question of how the value gets allocated. Yes, unions fought for higher wages and other benefits out of that value added. The wages paid also contributed to domestic demand – the workers bought things like cars and washing machines.

            As for other regulations, yes we could have some Randian paradise where pollution was unrestricted, where there were no safety or fire codes, where wages and hours were completely unregulated – it was the world 100 years or more ago, when there was child labor, factory fires, etc. I spend time in places where there are no or unenforced regulations, like Dubai. You really do not want to be anywhere but at the top of the heap in those places – paradise there, hell in the bottom half.

          • herddog505

            I don’t doubt it.

            It would be of some interest to know how the wages paid by the Big Three a half-century ago stack up to today’s if adjusted for inflation, and if those wages included health care and retirement benefits. I also suggest that the Big Three had little or no foreign competition; if an American wanted a car in 1962, he pretty much had a choice between Ford, GM, or Chrysler (unless he wanted to do the hippie thing and by a VW).

          • http://wizbangblog.com/author/rodney-graves/ Rodney G. Graves

            Note also that most of the Japanese and Korean auto companies have plants here in the United States which are turning handsome profits.

          • jim_m

            Wish granted! http://www.remappingdebate.org/map-data-tool/putting-new-gm-uaw-contract-historical-context

            What is made clear here is that wages themselves have not moved much but where the UAW workers make their money is in benefits and OT. What makes the US auto makers unprofitable is the total compensation paid to workers including pension benefits. The UAW pensions are gold plated plans that allow people to retire early with exceptional benefits. Back in the 60′s the big three could get away with it, but not today as the competitive environment has changed.

          • herddog505

            Thank you.

          • Commander_Chico

            Looks to me like wages under the new contracts are significantly lower, and likely to remain so.

            I am still waiting for an answer to my question about where the tens of millions of people who have below-average mental abilities are going to be able to make a decent living in the future, if there are no repetitive-action manufacturing jobs, no full-time service jobs, and no low-skill government jobs that aren’t privatized into low-wage, no-benefits part time jobs.

            On the other hand, the global economy will be able to produce enormous wealth in a more capital-intensive way. If that isn’t distributed, only the owners of capital and the high-skill managers and engineers will do well. The rest will be marginal or worse. Starvation eugenics.

          • herddog505

            As I’ve written before, the cry that machines are making men obsolete and millions will starve has been with us for centuries, yet people somehow seem to get along. Further, I suggest that increasing automation actually INCREASES employment opportunities for the less bright / educated: just about any fool can sit behind a machine and perform simple, repetitive tasks.

            Your arguments basically fly in the face of historical evidence. The United States and most of the rest of the world have shifted from agrarian economies to a highly automated, highly mechanized industrial (post-industrial?) economies even while growing their populations at an astounding rate. Somehow, all those people have found livelihoods. “Trickle down” actually does work: as a society becomes richer, there is more money for everybody. Oh, income distribution may not be as “fair” as lefties would like, but people make a living. I often ponder the number of gymnasiums, coffee shops, and massage parlors I see when I drive around: if Americans have enough money that they can afford those things, clearly they aren’t being squeezed too hard by the machine. For that matter, the fact that so many Americans are fat (as libs love to nag us about) also tells me that the machine isn’t driving us to starvation.

            As for employment for the truly dimwitted, perhaps we could expand the size of the Congress as others have suggested. They’d be right at home.

          • jim_m

            Those low skill jobs would still be available if the unions had not priced them out of the labor market here in the US. You want to complain that there aren’t jobs for low skill workers? It’s cheaper to send those jobs overseas and one reason is the unions.

          • herddog505

            I suggest that your argument can be expanded to some degree to include automation: why should Mr. Factory Owner pay for a hugely expensive machine if he can get that work done less efficiently but less expensively with a human work force?

          • jim_m

            I have actually seen that in action. A company I used to work for came out with an automated system to replace a manual process. The customer reaction was that they could not match the precision of the automation but that the manual process was far more efficient from both a time and cost perspective. Plus the training needed for the new equipment was greater than what was required for the manual process.

            The reason we don’t automate a lot of agriculture is the simple fact that labor is cheaper.

          • Commander_Chico

            Yes, if there was no block on paying workers $10 per 12 hour day in dangerous conditions and wages sunk to that level overall, there would be such jobs in the USA.

          • http://wizbangblog.com/author/rodney-graves/ Rodney G. Graves

            Straw man you much?

      • Brucehenry

        Not to quibble, but the rise of the middle class in medieval times began around 1000, considerably before Magna Carta in 1215. And it happened in Italy and Germany and France as well as in England.

        • jim_m

          I’m reading Churchill’s “History of the English Speaking Peoples” and the middle class rose far earlier than 1000. In fact it rose several times and was obliterated each time. What becomes clear is that the middle class thrives when taxes are low, allowing people to accumulate wealth.

          When tax rates go up the middle class is wiped out as they cannot accumulate wealth and the rich hoard what they have to avoid being taxed meaning that the poor suffer from decreased opportunities.

          The middle classes were really wiped out with war and conquest but they never reappear until a low tax environment was restored.

          Not much has changed in 1400-1500 years.

          • Brucehenry

            LOL, not a direct quote from Churchill, I’ll wager.

            Of course the middle class was healthier when taxes were low, all other things being equal. The trick was getting taxes right. They couldn’t be so low that the state couldn’t enforce law and order, or enforce contracts, or facilitate the building of infrastructure, and they couldn’t be so high as to become confiscatory.

            Also, there were other countries in Europe in the Middle Ages. Not just England. I think you’ll find that most people agree that the modern middle class, as a permanent fixture in Western society, had its origins somewhere in the neighborhood of 1000 C.E.

          • jim_m

            If it were a quote I would have used quotation marks. Duh!

            But he does explicitly make the point that in Medieval England (Well, Wessex and Mercia really around the time of Alfred the Great and earlier) that the middle classes flourished when given a relatively low tax environment. The surrounding lands by contrast were higher tax and had no middle class. When people were allowed to lift themselves out of poverty they did.

            When the government oppressed them with taxes (in an age when infrastructure spending meant new walls or the city and a new Keep) the people lived in relative poverty. It isn’t new, The left has just failed to understand how the world has worked for the last 1500 years. Those who fail to learn from the past are doomed to repeat it. The left will drive us all into poverty and they will think that they are doing us a favor by doing so.

  • Wild_Willie

    Matt Damon is quickly becoming a Sean Penn clone to me. His mouth moves faster than his brain. ww

    • http://opinion.ak4mc.us/ McGehee

      What doesn’t?

  • Guest

    I think you’re missing a crucial part of the metaphor. The rich live in a space station. This implies that class divisions have solidified to the point where it is impossible (or nearly impossible) for the poor on earth to ascend to the ranks of the very rich.

    • herddog505

      Yes, Hollywood does seem to like the idea of actual physical barriers between “rich” and “poor”. I suppose it’s because they actually do live that way.

      Hollywood – libs generally – seem to think that rich people literally have huge vaults of money and gold and treasure like Scrooge McDuck. In the movie “In Time”, the rich villain actually DID have his “wealth” in such a vault. With such a simplistic, child-like view of the world, it’s no wonder that they imagine people going in, taking the wealth, and redistributing it. “Scrooge McDuck has a hundred million dollars in his vault! There are a hundred thousand of us in Duckburg, so if we take his filthy money away from him and share it, then we all get… um… er… a thousand… bucks… apiece. Woo… hoo…”