I wonder kaju, would you ever be so angry with a film that advocated a Varna system in place of an egalitarian society?
My guess is that you wouldn’t.
Hope you like this review.
Thank you, as always for the the economic movie reviews haha.
Nolan (the writer) said some stupid things in a recent Newsarama interview: “The Joker is an anarcist, and becomes a terrorist, because we all know that anarchy leads to terrorism.” Sure.
Any valuable Libertarian themes in this movie can be attributed to the Batman mythos in general, and not some brilliant anti-statist stance that some people are straining to find. The Joker’s speech to Dent went against was enough to put the damper on any “Oh, this is a Libertarian movie” type of thinking.
Batman is however a Libertarian superhero, and is also Ron Paul’s favorite hero, or so I read in an interview.
Wouldn’t Batman also be an anarchist though?
Batman is a vigilante who competes with the state’s attempted monopoly on justice. On the other hand, it was a slight disappointment that Batman shuts down his non-state competitors (who were dunces).
Regardless of libertarianism, it was an excellent movie.
Batman is no more an anarchist than Robin Hood was. I see this misrepresented all the time. Many falsely paint Robin Hood as a socialist, “robbing from the rich and ‘giving’ to the poor” but that is patently false. Robin hood reclaimed the hard earned wealth that was rightfully earned by individuals and stolen by a tyrannical nanny state and he returned it to the people who earned it in the first place. Likewise, batman is the embodiment of the very patriotic notion that each individual, and most certainly not the state, is responsible for their own safety and security. The state has a servant role to play, but in no manner, way, shape or form is ever in any kind of authoritative role over the citizens that created it. Government is created to serve the people, not rule it, and the safety and security of each individual cannot be largely outsourced to a government bureaucracy. Of parallel interest is the common theme that Batman’s enemies are personally and psychologically linked to his own persona in one way or another. I think that points to the very nature of many of our own worst problems (big government, “the fed”, many foreign policy issues, a fragile currency, high taxes, etc) being self created, many times out of the best of intentions no less. In my opinion Batman is a very thinly veiled populist treatise advocating personal responsibility, private property, philanthropy, the critical nature of the Second Amendment in any truly free society and the role of and interaction between an elected government and its citizenry. If we saw a Batman movie where the villain stole the wealth of the average citizen, invaded their privacy, disarmed them all to the point of complete helplessness and ran through the streets dropping mass amounts of debased currency to devalue the fruits of everyone’s labor to the point of complete dependency while strengthening the powers that control them, we would be on the edge of our seats waiting for our hero to make things right. Yet somehow when all that happens in real life, we as a society are much more tolerant of it. I guess that’s what happens when the villains do their dirty work over the course of 100 years instead of in a tidy 120 minutes.
After thinking about it, I’m irked by the constant references to a government bureaucrat as the “white knight”. But that wasn’t enough to spoil the movie for me.
Do you know why that was though? The point was to show that not even a “white knight” politician is incorruptible. Only autonomous individuals.
True, but they then went on to show how Gotham needed to believe in the state government, at the expense of the autonomous individual, Batman.
Like I said though, it was still a kickass film.
Yeah. They should have dropped that part.