A world where the entire Earth is wasted and then completely abandoned is possible only in a world where humanity’s descendants were no longer individualistic. You’d think that a small group of people would had stayed behind to enjoy the wealth of space and resources, or that at least a few of AXIOM’s (human) members regularly resisted to restrictive policies of the ship, but no. Either BNL’s followers obliterated the dissenters, or everyone’s value systems gradually became permanently collective, ingrained in their DNA, under the tag of BNL…or both.

Alright. This is science-fiction after all. I’m open-minded about this hidden implication early on in the movie, even if it’s terribly unlikely to happen in the future. So why is it that the humans on board the AXIOM seemingly regain some of their individuality by the likes of Wall-E? After 700 years of mindlessly doing things as ordered, you’d think the BNL-ites would be immune to thinking for themselves, especially after what it takes for the wrecked Earth to occur.

Although I share the original author’s distaste for these plot-holes, I also recognize that movies like Wall-E exaggerate in order to appeal their message to younger audiences. Nevertheless, this exaggeration comes with drawbacks. While at its core, the message was certainly anti-collectivist, it is marred with the economic confusion that is BNL’s slogan, “Buy N Large”. Is it a corporatist-government? If so, why did BNL opt to undergo massive profit loss by dumping air+metal from the AXIOM while producing all the luxuries for its lazy and obese occupants and their descendants (who never pay a dime for the services)? Is BNL a metaphor of greedy mass consumption? If so, why did BNL merely leave to space instead of landing onto a different resource-rich planet? Better yet, why didn’t BNL capitalize on the massive recycle-ready resources of Earth?

Perhaps it would had been better if they had changed the slogan to “Believe N Large”, because it clearly took a collectivist belief for the Earth to be buried under trash over the centuries and left totally abandoned. Putting all this aside, I did enjoy the movie very much.

From my perspective, it appears that “unfettered capitalism” culminated into a single monopolistic company, as Leftist continually, but erroneously, contend. Typically, the Leftist believes that without government regulation that not only would corporations pollute to the extent that Earth would become inhabitable, but also that an unrestrained free market would result in a complete monopoly by one company, which in turn would become the de facto global hegemon. In this way, they perceive that capitalism would result in the situation as presented in the film.

Therefore, it would appear that this film is extremely socialist in its message, though the ideas it presents are likely to pass completely over the head of the average child.

I also think that Magnus has made the best counter-points. Great job.

And to the people with the ‘just a cartoon’ argument… You have to actually explain why it isn’t or can’t be propaganda. There are a quite large number of cartoons over the decades that were purely or partly propaganda. Disney was one of the main producers of such faire. For a while, the propaganda was arguably scarce, but we can definitely say those days of ‘scarcity’ are now long gone. Half the product coming out of TV and movie studios these days seems to have some social message, and for the ones that don’t, we now have the new phenomenon of breaks in the middle of the show where a show’s star delivers a fact-free appeal to ‘do our part’ to stop ‘climate change’. ‘Climate change’ happens regardless, and I don’t know how I’m supposed to stop Global Cooling, which is what we appear to have now, and for possibly the next couple of decades. (Nor have I ever been given a convincing reason why change of the warming variety is especially bad, all things considered.)

Given that a Pixar animation is ‘highly’ designed and planned, with years of work and a great deal of thought put into every single choice, it is wrong to assume a priori that no thought is put into underlying themes, that it is ‘just a cartoon’. And Wall-e’s conception actually predates the creation of Toy Story, I believe, so they had been kicking it around for quite a while.

But I will agree that there is not any overt, gratuitous propaganda in this one. Typically weak understanding of economics? No doubt. Does it matter? Sure, at least some, and probably quite a bit, since there is virtually no economics taught outside of a college, and then it’s likely to be worse than no economics education at all.

I just watched Wall-e with my 5-yr old. I remember thinking, “what the…? They ‘want’ to go back and plant stuff? Of course, it was somewhat funny, and maybe intended to be a joke only. On the other hand, if I had to eat ‘cup-cake in a cup’ every day for my no-doubt technologically extended life, I would leap at a chance to eat ‘any’ new thing, even if it was soy-burgers with rice-bread.

I’m wondering, though, where do the psycho robots fit in? No one has mentioned them, yet. Humans were static, naively happy, mind-numbed and homogenous. I got the sense that they couldn’t even have had a sex-drive, and procreation and child-rearing must have been done exclusively and automatically by the ship’s systems. But the most human characters were the robots: self-motivated, inventive, quirky, ‘deranged’, evil, altruistic, heroic, and in Eve’s case, able to break free of ‘her’ programmed objective to determine her own path. The misfit robots were very interesting. Do they fit into the identified pro-liberty, anti-fascist/corporatist framework? (I know… I’m not supposed to ‘overthink’ it. Just lay back in my floating couch and follow the prompts on the screen, right? Where’s my cup-o-cup-cake at? Mmmmm. “Blue is the new Red.” Wait, does that mean Blue-states are taking over Red states? )

Left-libertarian? Is there a hippie commune that survived and prospered that I don’t know about? It sure didn’t seem to work out so well for the Pilgrims or the 1st century church in Jerusalem, either.

I read a left-libertarian sci-fi novel a while back. Somehow (and I do mean ‘somehow’ since it was never explained why the technology would be developed, engineered, and produced in the exact form needed, and left un-utilized by anyone until needed by the protagonist) the L-Ls could produce an ultra-advanced technology that just laid around in bins until the hero needed it to save the world, but the R-Ls, using active competition, couldn’t come up with computer security that could stand up to outside attack. Of course, the L-L’s didn’t have the vulnerability to computer attack, since they had no computers. Utter bilge.

Ignoring the ridiculous nature of the story, what do we have?

Well, on one end, we have a future version of Earth, wrecked by rampant consumerism, fed by a single corporation. As many commentators are fond of pointing out (though I’m not sure I agree), corporatism could not exist without government intervention.

The interesting twist, of course, and one you don’t get until you see the AXIOM, is that the single corporation is ALSO the government…and they’re here to help.

The ship has been in space for 700 years, when it was only meant to be out for five while the Wall- droids cleaned up the Earth. And to keep the populace happy and sedated, B&L chose to use–you guessed it–rampant consumerism.

It took a moment of rugged individualism on the Captain’s part to fight against the state and start a revolution, ultimately ending with the people of the ship being freed of their virtual slavery on board the AXIOM, and deposited on the Earth to be free to build a society as they deemed fit, and at least at the moment they left the AXIOM, they were free–free, even, to fail.

That so many of you seem unable to grasp this strengthens my resolved that your movement is a sad, confused lot who can’t even come up with a definition for free-market capitalism or for Libertariansm that more than one person can agree with.

To be sure, there was an element of economic ignorance in the depiction of the off-earth human colony: It was way too efficient and technologically slick to be plausible – no State ( or monopoly) could achieve that. The story would have been much improved had the colony been shown to have suffered the technological hamfistedness and mindless bureaucracy depicted in, say, the dystopian sci-fi film Brazil.

But that caveat aside, the movie in sum reflected a triumph of the human spirit, in the form of the victory of choice over the force of Authoritarian compulsion ( albeit a sugar-coated ‘benign’ authoritarianism), even ( or especially) when the choice entails the rejection of compelled comfort and mindless conformity, in favour of pioneering adventure and a return to a long-missed home.

My son, of course, saw little of this deconstructionism. He was most entertained by the antics of Wall E and his indestructible cockroach sidekick.

So they were the result of coerced non free market non choices. Got it.

P.M.Lawrence: “Is rtr “Person” posting under a different name? He displays, in spades, Person’s almost preternatural inability to grasp a point.”

Whomever that “Person” is should take that as quite a compliment. But I, in fact, have only ever posted here as “rtr”.

Wrong, in general. I wrote “when free choices were available” [emphasis added]. I did not say they were free market choices – mostly, they were not.

To recap, things like the Leverburgh situation were free market, and people stayed out of the factories. Things like the English Enclosures, the Highland Clearances and the Irish Evictions weren’t, so people going into factories and mines during the Industrial Revolution don’t tell you anything about free market choices because leaving rural lifestyles wasn’t a free market choice.

Please try not to line up my descriptions with things they don’t describe. That’s misrepresentation.

So they were free market choices. Got it.

The whole point is, those weren’t assumptions but descriptions of what actually happened, historically, when free choices were available. I even cited the Leverburgh natural experiment in support of that. As for “especially when trying to apply his theory to the American landscape as opposed to the British” – I didn’t, just there. If I had wanted to describe what actually happened there, I would most likely have drawn on Henry George’s descriptions (not his theorising), but I didn’t do that because I didn’t have to. Stolyarov made a general statement about people preferring factories; in order to refute it I only had to look at particular situations to get counter-examples, so I looked at ones I was most familiar with. My understanding of the US situation is that land became dominated by the effects of land grants and taxes, directly for new farms and indirectly for transport access to it, and by mortgages and tax structures encouraging smaller farmers with a dependence on outside finance over larger self-financing ones. When the noose tightened, people were squeezed out because they had become dependent on outside resources they no longer had.

Rtr believes that “Enclosure was turning socialist common land into private property. Sure, there may be some complaints that privatization didn’t occur fairly…” He misunderstands. It wasn’t socialist, any more than if I make a lease of my land to someone else, that person has a socialist connection with it. Just as he owns the lease and I no longer own the land free and clear, the commoners had property rights on the common – restricted, non-transferrable ones, just as a lease might have a covenant stopping the renter transferring it, but property rights all the same. The “privatising” was in fact seizing without compensation, expropriation. Sure, you can complain that stealing isn’t fair – but if you only put it that way, people won’t get the point.

The wikipedia entry has repeated a common American mistake, thinking that “commons” is singular. It isn’t; there were lots of commons, e.g. the famous Wimbledon Common in England and Boston Common in the USA. This isn’t just a quibble, because it relates to just who had rights where, and whether the Tragedy of the Commons could happen (see below).

It’s important to make it clear just which period is involved, because different things happened to land use and to the evicted at different periods. Likewise it is important to be clear just which kind of productivity is involved. When Rtr writes “…but there is no doubt enclosure privatization led to increased productivity. If there was any theft of land, it was giant land tracts being awarded by the King to become manor estates.”, this is wrong. This is the Tudor phase, and it led to a drop in food production as arable land was turned over to sheep. Net cash yields rose, but that is not an increase in production per unit land, it is an increase in production per unit labour of the remaining peasants. Net gains came largely from cost cutting, externalising the costs of the new vagrants.

“The focus shifted to implementation of new agricultural techniques, including fertilizer, new crops, and crop rotation, all of which greatly increased the profitability of large-scale farms.” is drawn from the part of the wikipedia article about the later phase. The actual Enclosures did not cause these gains; small farms could also have used these techniques, with a different system of enclosure keeping the land in the same hands – only, that didn’t happen. Even so, it’s a precondition, not a cause; and, in fact, you could probably have made it work on the Lammas Land system of common, with grazing etc. only in certain seasons but allocate planting etc. at other times.

‘Those are productivity gains from privatization of property overcoming the so-called “tragedy of the commons” independent of technology gains from the Industrial Revolution.’ This is a widespread mistake. There never was any Tragedy of the Commons on actual English commons, except when commoners’ rights had already been destroyed! Precisely because there were property rights, only commoners could use each common, and only on their own common and only as far as the rights allowed. Buchan’s life of Cromwell describes how one of Cromwell’s relatives was had up before the magistrates for going beyond his entitlement on Putney Common.

‘”In 1515, conversion from arable to pasture became an offence.” Relatively more profitable sheep pasturing was being artificially restricted by government interference.’ Er… this is actually a common mistake made by governments, trying to undo their own harm by regulation. But the “more profitable sheep pasturing” was itself artificial!

Rtr is wrong in the first part and right in the second of “…the Tudors originally in favor of the commons so as to quell vagrancy and rebellion. All sides avoided a free market solution economic solution.” Originally, the Tudors were indifferent, not having realised what was happening – the regulation came in once they did, and later still they favoured Enclosures.

We have an inaccurate understanding of English history in “in England sheep herders favored enclosure while the farmers there favored commons”. The “sheep herders” (shepherds, actually) were the impoverished survivors of the peasants who had lost their property rights on commons; they did not favour enclosure, the new landlords did. Likewise the farmers did not favour commons, as they had separate farms; it was the peasants who were not farmers who needed their rights on the common.

Rtr made up ‘”Enclosed lands normally could demand higher rents than unenclosed,” Solely because of increased productivity on enclosed lands versus inefficient productivity on common lands.’ Because of increased capture of the value of economic activity on the land by the landlords. The common land approach tended to route much of that straight to the peasants in kind, bypassing the cash economy let alone the landlords. Productivity only looks worse if you don’t/can’t count it, but actually there wasn’t much in it either way. But see also the role of the pig in peasant capital accumulation, as described in Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe or as happened with the Creole Pig in Haiti until the USA intervened.

There is a strange mixture in “If all those people had remained farmers they would have truly lived in abject poverty, fighting for scarce land, flooding the market with food over production causing low crop prices and low rents for use of land to be collected”. It appears to be describing late 18th century conditions. Before Malthusian constraints hit, if people had had their own access to resources, none of this could have happened (in real life, the Enclosures happened and people could suffer before the limits were hit). Once Malthusian constraints hit, there would have been widespread poverty, but:-

- shifting people off the land wouldn’t have changed that, only where the poor were; and

- leaving them on the land would have left them poor, but not overworked the way Stolyarov described.

Also, there would not have been food over-production – if you have hit Malthusian limits you can’t produce enough food, and with a peasant population doing most of the producing and consuming, crop prices don’t relate closely to production since so much isn’t in the cash economy (prices can go high or low depending on a lot of other things – including levels of rent and tax).