Saturday, July 23, 2005

Vilifying Subsidies in Popular Culture

I was happy to see that in the super-funny (I'm not using the word "hilarious" only because it's overused on the internet) movie Wedding Crashers, the movie's primary antagonist is a guy who (to paraphrase) 'got the governor to subsidize a scallop fishery' (or something along those lines). Anyway, what I'm so happy about is that the subsidy-seeking is not crucial to the character's persona. Rather, it's just thrown in there, almost capriciously. Like they producers of the movie are saying to the audience, "Yeah, this guy's already a jerk, but on top of it all, he lobbies for increased subsidies!"

It's subtle, and most viewers probably didn't even notice it, but it was encouraging to see. After all, they could have made the antagonist a guy who works to eliminate trade restrictions (as a stereotypical "evil capitalist"), but they didn't. Those chose to vilify subsidies.

UPDATE: For comments, see the original blog post here.

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