Hollywood And Economics

Thomas Sowell have a good column where he notes that people in Hollywood are usually economically ignorant. He uses a good example of a recent movie where Starbucks is attacked for buying coffee beans from poverty stricken Ethiopian farmers. But as Sowell points out, these farmers would have been far worse hadn't Starbucks bought their beans.

And since the root cause of their low income is low productivity, the suggestion from some leftists that we should force them to have minimum wages at western levels or else refuse to trade with them ("fair trade") would simply make all of them unemployed.

It is interesting and very appropriate that Townhall uses a picture of Angelina Jolie to illustrate economic ignorance in Hollywood since she have been the most active spreader of economic fallacies lately. Apart from giving away a lot of her own money (which I don't mind if she does as it is her money, but it isn't the solution to world poverty), she has been actively lobbied both for an expanded welfare state at home and sharp increases in foreign aid. She have actively spread the myth that the West is responsible for third world poverty and that aid is the way to solve it.

That would be bad enough, regardless of which Hollywood personality spread it, but what is really bizarre is that someone with such a confused altruist and socialist outlook also claimed to support Ayn Rand and is reportedly going to play Dagny Taggart in the coming Atlas Shrugged movie.

Apparently, Jolie seem to have the same relationship to Rand's ideas as Alan Greenspan. Having her playing Dagny Taggart is about as appropriate as having central bank foe Andrew Jackson depicted on the twenty dollar bills printed by the current central bank in the United States.

Here is btw a funny Dilbert cartoon satirizing Jolie's preference for adopting children from the third world.