Why We Put Up with Hollywood

Americans are the most generous people in the world, despite what the decidedly anti-American Kofi Annan claimed in late 2006 in a particularly idiotic moment – even for him. There is good reason for Americans to be generous. We have been the most blessed in the world as far as material things are concerned, and the breathtaking vistas in many part of the United States cannot help but make the most ardent atheist wonder whether God dwells in their majesty (or at least has a vacation home there).

But the statistics on how much Americans give to charity is incomplete. By most standards, big government, pushed by bleeding heart liberals since the 1960s to give our tax dollars to the poor, has screwed this up as it does with everything that falls outside its three real jobs. It has also skewed the picture dramatically, by taking away some of the money we used to give to the charities we deemed most worthy, and giving to those that liberals deem most worthy.

So what does this have to do with Hollywood? Everything. Hollywood is filled (mostly) with liberal, high-income, entertainment industry types who most of us at the bottom recognize as having unique talent. Most of us also don’t believe that it’s really worth $20 million per movie. But we do pay the ticket and DVD prices that give them that money. So why?

There is a piece of the American psyche that sympathizes with the socialist principle of “from each according to their ability; to each according to their need.” It’s not a huge portion of the American psyche, but it is there. That portion is heavily represented by the entertainment industry.

We conservatives might get extremely irritated with the likes of Rosie and others from time to time, but it is hard to deny that there are many (including Rosie) who do good, noble, and spiritually uplifting work outside the political arena.

Their role in American society is to redistribute a portion of income. That’s what socialism does; it redistributes income. That is what people in Hollywood do. They earn large sums of money from people who can afford their services and redistribute it to those they deem worthy. It is, essentially, the socialist arm of our capitalist society.

Adam Smith’s invisible hand has guided the course of Capitalism in the United States for the 200+ years representing the greatest (and by greatest I mean the most successful and most far-reaching) economic and political experiment the world has ever known. The genius of the invisible hand continues to exert its influence in the charitable sector of our society as well as it reflects the American psyche in matters of money, whether we utilize that money to improve our lives through the enterprise that earns more money or use it to improve our lives through helping our neighbors.

The rants and raves of Rosie O’Donnell, Alec Baldwin, Sean Penn, and on and on are part of the price we pay to run the socialist arm of American Society. We need to remember that when we observe them behaving in this fashion.

I desperately wish that I could formulate the same sort of cost/benefit analysis that would allow me to tolerate the bad behavior of liberals in Congress and the media. I can’t.