Stossel

This weekend is the Oscars! As a stutterer, I'm excited that the King's Speech is favored to win for best picture and best actor. It actually gets stuttering mostly right. Hollywood gets so much else wrong. For example: The movie makers obsess about the Oscars because movies that win make more money. Oscar nominees re-release their movie around Oscar season. They are smart capitalists. So, why then, are they so clueless about capitalism!? And hostile to capitalism?! This ticks me off. Movie villains used to be Indians, but then that became politically incorrect. Nazis were the villains after World War II, then Russians, then aliens and mobsters. Briefly Arabs were villains, but then that became politically incorrect. Today, it seems like most of the rapacious villains are businessmen. On my FBN show tonight, radio host Michael Medved talks about the ways in which Hollywood gets capitalism wrong. Famed director Oliver Stone is one of the biggest offenders. His Wall Street movies portray “greed” as evil, and he clearly does not get economics. In the first Wall Street, villain Gordon Gekko says business is "a zero sum game -- somebody wins, somebody loses. Money itself isn't lost or made; it's simply transferred from one perception to another." That’s just wrong. It’s a commonly repeated myth: “when the rich get richer, the poor get poorer.” But if you think of wealth as a pie, the rich aren’t taking more slices from the poor. The rich bake new pies every day. That’s how they get rich. Everyone gets richer when the rich get richer. Another big offender is director James Cameron. In the Alien series, it’s a greedy mega-corporation that seeks to capture the aliens. In Titanic, it’s a greedy businessman who pressures the captain to go faster despite the icebergs. Most recently, in Avatar, it’s an evil mining corporation that wants to destroy the natural habitat of the noble savages.

I revere the Founders. The media revere the “green” movement, the anti-war movement, politicians and activists like Erin Brockovich. The media are party clueless, and apparently, so am I. Did you know the Founders fought against dancing, interracial mixing and masturbation? Did you know Martin Luther King called rock 'n' roll evil and degraded black music? Did you know Erin Brockovich’s lawyer buddies made $100,000,000 suing PG&E? The movie was wonderful, and Julia Roberts deserves her Oscar. But the “true” story behind it is largely lawyer deceit. The California Cancer Registry analyzed cancer rates in the area and found no elevation in the level of cancer. But the power company paid the lawyers millions to go away, and Californians pay the cost in their electric bills. So why are the lawyers heroes?