Politics breeds hypocrisy. Who knew?
February 18, 2009 – 9:05 pm by JohnMichiganders must be some of the biggest hypocrites in the American political scene today. All I heard on the radio for the entire fall was how the country needed the auto industry to be bailed out at almost any cost, it was the lifeblood of the middle class, a fundamental part of the economy, if it failed then all kinds of other companies would go bankrupt, and that anyone who opposed a government bailout of the automotive companies must have had selfish ulterior motives (mainly, Richard Shelby, senator from Alabama, who has a lot of foreign automotive assembly plants in his state).
Disregarding even the rampant hypocrisy of lashing out at senators from other states who could be said to be acting merely in self-defense when they opposed the bailout (which amounted to transferring dollars from their constituents to Michigan residents), we see even more hypocrisy in the fact that the same people who wanted the automotive companies to be given even more taxpayer money than they have (so far) been given scoff at the idea of a bailout of the porno industry.
Today the WRIF morning show interviewed Joe Francis, the producer of the Girls Gone Wild franchise, and before they got him on the phone they were laughing derisively at the idea that the Imperial Federal Government should bail out the pornography industry. Joe Francis and Hustler publisher Larry Flynt have made an official plea to Congress to give pornographers a $5 billion donation because the recession has made people more depressed and their sex drives have therefore diminished. The porno industry can help millions of Americans, they claim, so it should be bailed out for the good of the country.
How many people are employed by the pornography industry? How many people buy its products? What percentage of the American economy is due to pornography? (I don’t know the exact numbers and don’t care, though I could probably find out with Google.) Since Americans actually want pornography and pay a lot of money for it, two facts that distinguish it from American cars, the pornography industry might be deemed more worthy of saving than American automakers. There is exactly nothing that makes GM or Chrysler more deserving of saving than any porno company. (Of course, there is nothing that makes any company worthy of receiving taxpayer dollars, but then again there isn’t even a government worthy of receiving our money…)
Anyone claiming that one industry or group of companies should receive loans, grants, or bailouts from the federal government but another industry or group of companies shouldn’t is a complete hypocrite and cannot back up his claim with any principles of any kind. All this meddling by the government and rent-seeking by otherwise good and private companies creates a divisive, embittering attitude amongst the public—a feeling of “I have to grab my slice of pie from the State or else someone else will get it” or “We should get this or that amount of money and you shouldn’t!” Despite the incessant insistences of liberal anti-capitalists, this is not the nature of competition in free-market capitalism. As George Reisman wrote, “The truth is that economic competition is the very opposite of competition in the animal kingdom. It is not a competition in the grabbing off of scarce nature-given supplies, as it is in the animal kingdom. Rather, it is a competition in the positive creation of new and additional wealth.” Competition in this atmosphere of socialist wealth-redistribution and political (instead of economic) decision-making is embittering, divisive, and wealth-destroying.
P.S. I wonder how many spam comments this post will receive, with all the instances of the word “pornography” and its derivations in the post…
