They Don’t Understand Psychology Either By: shep

by shep

John Rogers:

This is where I'm always amused at libertarians, because they so love markets but never seem to understand how business actually works. If you, my fine libertarian friend, decide to forego the union and negotiate your own contract vis a vis residuals (or pretty much anything else), you will find that unless you are one of the maybe eight out of 12,0000 most famous and profitable writers in Hollywood, you will get exactly the same deal from each studio, or slightly worse. Because what possible motivation would they have to share their profits, relative to each of the other five competitors? That's just common sense.

Rogers is obviously talking about the writers’ strike – cruise the whole blog if you want a great writer’s perspective on the issues.

But he also make a great point about Iibertarian “free-market” types: they have no idea how the marketplace really works, suffering mainly from the delusion that the market is always a force for competition and good (Microsoft, Enron and Halliburton, they never explain). Rogers uses a great Chris Rock joke as a metaphor for the amoral, predatory nature of business:

One of my favorite jokes, just a lovely piece of writing, is Chris Rock's bit about the time one of Siegfried and Roy's tigers mauled Roy.

"Everybody's mad at the tiger. 'That tiger went crazy!' That tiger didn't go crazy ... that tiger went tiger."

This is how I feel about corporations in general, extended to the Studios in particular. There are those who rail at the AMPTP for being profit-maximizing heartless, soul-less bastards as if that were a bad thing. It's not.

A corporation's job is to make money, and if necessary fuck you in the process. Just like a tiger's job is to eat, and if necessary kill you in the process. I'm okay with that. I like capitalism. A lot. I like tigers. A lot. That doesn't mean I trust corporations not to try to screw me and everyone next to me when negotiating. Nor would I trust a tiger not to attack me in the wild. Nor am I personally offended when they try.

Exactly. It’s just business. But that is why you need regulatory government and institutions like unions to make it a fair fight. You alone, against the tiger, will soon be jungle fertilizer, ten times out of ten.

And the problem stretches the tiger analogy when you look at the other worst consequence of unregulated “free-markets”: pretty soon the biggest, baddest, most ruthless tigers start eating their own until there are only a few left that can survive (see Microsoft, Enron and Halliburton). In other words, competition – the supposed source of predictably “good” market outcomes - gets gobbled up by the market itself if left to its own amoral, greed and power-based nature.

You’d think that these facts would be self-evident, looking at what has actually transpired in marketplaces and societies throughout history, relative to the strength of existing trade unions and other worker and consumer-based institutions and (very occasionally) liberal, democratic government. But that’s reality-based thinking and, I’m sure, not nearly as satisfying as a simplistic, comforting worldview about business, government and human nature gleaned from a work of bad fiction.

[Cross-posted at E Pluribus Unum]