I like to think that we may be entering a golden age of libertarian entertainment:
“Silver Circle” is an animated love story/hyperinflation dystopia set at the Federal Reserve. It had its Washington-area premiere this weekend: one screen, one theater, a one-week run at the Regal theater in the Ballston Common mall.
“Did somebody find a money clip?” a man, one of about 40 people in attendance, hollers into the darkness just before the film began Friday evening.
“Wait, is there free money here?” someone asks.
“It’s Federal Reserve money,” a third person responds. “Not worth anything anyway.”
Now someone needs to make a movie about Bitcoin.
Zifnab25
I keep telling every Libertarian that will listen, that I am more than willing to take all their worthless Federal Reserve money off their hands. No one has taken me up on the offer.
Laura C
Ha ha ha. The Ballston Regal is where movies go to die. The only time I’ve been there was when I was dragging my boyfriend to see Going the Distance (a movie I loved), and since it had flopped and left all the theaters in the District, we had to go out to Ballston, which was the only place in the metro area still playing it.
Bulworth
@Zifnab25: Heh, indeedy
Bulworth
New movie idea: Waiting For Hyperinflation
liberal
Of course, the reason why they fixate on this hyperinflation story is that they have no idea how the banking system works. They think that the Fed injecting reserves into the system must of necessity cause hyperinflation.
Sadly, it’s not clear to me that “our side” (Krugman?) really understands banking, either. The traditional model of fractional reserve banking doesn’t seem right. Right now the theory which seems most empirically reasonable to me is “monetary realism.”
jibeaux
I just hope the volatility of the Bitcoin market can cause a rebound in Beanie Babies, my mom’s still got a ton of those.
Omnes Omnibus
@Zifnab25: I shall try this out. If it works, I’ll email you my thanks from Paris.
maya
Next attraction: A libertarian interpretation of Poe’s, The Gold Bug
Then: Birth of a Notion, where a baby actually pulls himself up by his own umbilical cord in those dark, Obama years and winds up a trillionaire during the Rand Paul, Jr. administration.
JKormac
@liberal: Fractional reserve banking has nothing to do with the Fed.
Apart from the regular and generous distribution of bailout cash, that is.
Todd
They’ve been warning us of the imminent financial doom to be wrought by fiat currency for the past 99.3 years now.
Surely they must eventually be correct. Surely.
The Moar You Know
Idiots still incapable of comprehending that money backed by precious metals is still fiat currency.
Alex S.
Was the screening free? Did it cost money? Was Federal Reserve money used to buy tickets?
Omnes Omnibus
@The Moar You Know: Precious metals have an intrinsic quantifiable value that does not fluctuate. It is known. GOLD!!!! Or something like that.
WereBear
@maya: Next up, How Gold Was my Greenbacks, about Ron Paul studying oppression by owning unsafe mines.
MattF
The whole bitcoin phenomenon is a fever dream. This morning, Krugman makes the obvious and needs-to-be-repeated-as-often-as-possible point that bitcoins are the ultimate ‘fiat’ currency, ‘conjured out of thin air.’ Or, if you prefer, currency that was invented by an invisible and anonymous Japanese computer scientist, if that gives you more confidence. Also, the bitcoin market manages to cleverly combine the worst features of commodity and currency trading with the risk of being hacked.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@The Moar You Know:
Yes this. Typically when you ask libertarians why they think gold is anything but what market decides at the moment they go change the subject. The exception being one libertarian who thought wealth should be based on cattle, or the like, because you could eat that.
Bob
Well, after Atlas Shrugged ruled the box office for months on end you just knew there would be copycats. Right?
DankNuggets_420weed_guy
laugh it up all you want, libs, today and last friday I am aquiring several thousand dollars worth of godl and sliver The Feds games cannot last forever, soon things will spin out of control, zerohedge.com I live for this shit
Bob2
DougJ, I disagree
http://www.bigheadpress.com/tpbtgn
I think we peaked with this comic.
Mark B.
I have an idea for a science fiction short story where aliens are planning to take over earth by remote control, but they need way more bandwidth and computing power than they can economically transport interstellar distances. So they create a fictional currency that people have to turn over tons of processing power to get a tiny amount. The project is completed at exactly the same time the last piece of fictional currency is minted. What do you think?
Ash Can
@Omnes Omnibus: Lol! The free markets are God unless and until they do something these idiots don’t like. Then they’re being distorted by sinister interventionary forces.
I wouldn’t mind if this wankery were limited to free-market fanfic, semi-private cult cinema, and other amateur endeavors. But there are far too many of these knuckleheads, and grifters taking advantage of them, in positions of actual policy-making and influence for me to consider them just harmless geeks.
WereBear
@Ash Can: It’s kind of comic-booky… the Republican Party, through greed and a lust for power, ingested a looney-virus to make them stronger… and now the loonies are devouring THEM.
ericblair
@Omnes Omnibus:
Yeah, it’s not like a bunch of furriners can just go and dig it out of the dirt or anything.
Ask the Spanish Empire (somehow) whether or not you can have significant inflation in a gold-based economy.
WereBear
@ericblair: And it’s not like the price of anything is set in stone. Just look at the tulip bulb craze in Holland, or the present valuation of diamonds.
You’d think these free marketeers would get that. But instead it’s more of an ideology than a “science.”
Bubblegum Tate
I liked this part of the plot summary:
Sexy anarchist–band name! I call it!
chopper
i feel bad for the poor teenage shmuck at the counter who had to weigh out all the tiny, tiny bits of gold these assholes brought to pay with.
cvstoner
Why do we have to keep learning this lesson over and over?
Shalimar
From the link:
I might take libertarianism more seriously if the things that make the villains evil in their fantasy worlds had any possibility of actually happening in real life. When is the Federal Reserve going to get this magic power to evict people? Wouldn’t it make more sense and be more realistic to point out that banks have been evicting the hard-working middle class from their homes in record numbers for almost half a decade now?
Villago Delenda Est
@Todd:
The problem of course is all currency is fiat currency.
They seem to think that gold and silver have fixed values. The Spanish Empire would like to call them and give them a case history of how this is simply not true.
Also (and I’m sounding like a broken record) they can slog through 100 or so pages of that obscure Scotsman’s book where he talks about how it took more silver at the end of the 17th century to buy a bushel of wheat than it took at the beginning.
Villago Delenda Est
@WereBear:
That will be a bitcoin, please, for this minor correction.
Villago Delenda Est
@ericblair:
Darn, I should have read the comments before mine, and saw that you made the same point I did later.
I’m not sure there is a cure for the stupidity of the goldbugs, aside from what one of my tech friends calls “the four word solution”.
Villago Delenda Est
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
The obscure Scotsman tells a story about how when the Spanish got to America, they asked about gold. The Mongols, on the other hand, when learning of Europe, asked about how many head of cattle the French had.
Todd
@Villago Delenda Est:
Years ago, I remember reading some article where an economist stated that you could still see an underlying cycle in the Spanish economy that reflected a ghostly echo of inflationary surges and followon deflation whenever Spanish colonial interests discovered and mined out new precious metal deposits. It was posited that this became so broad because of the expense of the military effort needed to expand, pacify and maintain the empire, and that the expenses actually exceeded the gains made.
I also found this article fascinating.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-07-31/default-more-than-400-years-ago-leaves-scars-christophe-chamley.html
James K. Polk, Esq.
http://www.xe.com/currencycharts/?from=XAU&to=USD&view=1Y
Goldbugs taking a beating today. Off 10% already!
But your fiat currency is the real scam.
JoeShabadoo
@liberal: it’s a little more than that. They despise inflation in all shapes and forms so they portray it as world ending. They consider inflation a hidden tax on people with money and all taxes are of course evil.
It’s why they can get behind bit coin despite the fact that it will constantly deflate which is far worse for the economy than inflation. They either don’t give a shit about the the benefits of mild inflation or wave away deflationary, stagnation policy as “the free market will fix it.”
Frankensteinbeck
‘Hyperinflation dystopia’. They really live in a fantasy world.
liberal
@JoeShabadoo:
Yes, of course.
Villago Delenda Est
@JoeShabadoo:
The important thing, after all, is that the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer.
The rich, of course, are favored by Mammon, their invisible sky buddy.
catclub
@WereBear: “is set in stone.”
“present valuation of diamonds”
I saw what you did there.
Square Cut or pear shape, these rocks don’t lose their shape.
MattF
@JoeShabadoo: More specifically, inflation is good for debtors– the fixed amount you owe gets relatively smaller. Goldbugs are currency supply-siders, the demand side for currency is all those pathetic little people who get paid to do things, rather than sit back and collect interest.
Comrade Dread
@Shalimar: Libertarians only recognize abuse of power when the government is the actor.
If a business does the same thing, it is only exercising the power it is only exercising the powers its customers have rendered to it by giving it business.
The philosophy assumes that all actors will be rational, that no company will cheat to get ahead without being punished, and that the only power one should worry about is the power of the government, because the market will take care of corporations that exercise their power unwisely.
What they general fail to acknowledge is that once a person or company has sufficient assets and wealth, a sufficient enough power imbalance is created between buyers and sellers that the market cannot often punish wrongdoers.
Also, true anarchy will never exist. You will simply end up with a legion of powerful, wealthy feudal lords in the end.
catclub
@Bubblegum Tate: How about Anarchical sexists?
Villago Delenda Est
@Comrade Dread:
And these twits imagine they will be the feudal lords.
ericblair
@JoeShabadoo:
More specifically, people with money who are idle rent-seekers, who aren’t much good for the economy as a whole. The good thing (for non-goldbugs) about low but positive inflation is that it erodes the ability of people to sit on their asses for generations extracting tolls from others, and actually make them go out and do something with the assets. That’s also why in many countries there are limits to how long you can lease things out, and why there are adverse possession laws.
@Shalimar:
You gotta love this sort of multi-purpose boogyman extension. Similarly, according to finer action movies and pulp fiction, the NSA is full of SEAL-like special ops agents and shadowy political operatives, instead of a bunch of computer nerds with bad haircuts and high security clearances.
Roger Moore
@Omnes Omnibus:
Interestingly, gold is off about 8.5% so far today. Goldbugs are naturally claiming it’s a giant conspiracy by the Fed.
MattF
@Roger Moore: And supposing, for the sake of argument, that the fall in the price of gold is a giant conspiracy by the Fed… why would that be a bad thing?
ericblair
@MattF:
Well, ya see, the great thing about GOOOLLLD is that it has Inherent Value and therefore can’t be manipulated by Evil Gubmint Organizations, so the Gubmint is fighting it by, um, manipulating the value of GOOOLLLD.
Villago Delenda Est
@ericblair:
And they are so wed to their dogma that they can’t grok the inherent silliness of this.
Mike G
The producers probably paid the movie theater to show this dog. Many movies are contractually obligated to have a “US theater run”, so they pay one theater somewhere to run it for a week to qualify.
Maybe it will take the title of Lowest Grossing Film of All Time from this baby —
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zyzzyx_Road
Robert
They’ve been pushing this crock since New York Comic Con 2011. They flagged me down on the show floor because of my press pass (strike 1, I am not a dog, you do not get to whistle at me and offer me a treat to keep me interested). I obliged because I’m not a total jackass and they started selling me some line about Occupy Wall Street and how this film will reveal the truth about the Fed (strike 2, I never heard these talking points when I covered the actual OWS movement). Then I looked down and saw a copy of Atlas Shrugged sticking out of one of the two booth employee’s bags (strike 3). I thanked them for the gigantic stack of promotional material they gave me and was forced to spin the wheel of prizes. Oh, I didn’t win anything worthwhile but I was given a shiny sticker coin “as valuable as an actual quarter in this economy.” Then they handed me more material about their screening during NYCC.
I left the booth and made a beeline for the bathroom. As I suspected, they slapped a giant Silver Circle sticker on my back when they talked me through the film without actually discussing plot, characters, setting, or political purpose. Smoke and mirrors, this one. I’m still on their mailing list and routinely cackle at their “We’re playing 2 nights in Wala Wala. Take that, Obamacare!” newsletters.
Jay in Oregon
@Bob2:
“But for reasons still subject to debate, it took ten years to sell 40,000 copies, and was never reprinted by the publisher.”
That kinda says it all, really. Marvel Comics can crank out A-Babies vs. X-Babies, with toddler versions of the X-men versus toddler versions of the Avengers, and hit 40,000 copies without breaking a sweat.
Howlin Wolfe
@DankNuggets_420weed_guy: Here, weed_guy, have some periods: . . . . . . . . . .
Bubblegum Tate
@catclub:
Well, as the great Nigel Tufnel said, “What’s wrong with being anarchical sexist?”
cyntax
@Roger Moore:
The less crazy ones are claiming it’s due to leveraged hedge funds selling off. And they might be right. Also, the last two times this happened (2008 and 2011), stocks followed gold, so we might see some crazy stuff happening more generally in the next couple days, to say nothing of what the 2008 sell-off presaged. Still correlation and all…
Roger Moore
@cyntax:
And I assume it might have something to do with Cyprus’s plan to sell off most of its gold reserves to cover part of the cost of its banking meltdown. Nothing like dumping a bunch of product on the market to pop an asset bubble.
cyntax
@Roger Moore:
Yeah, that’s definitely part of the mix. Although the argument concerning Cyprus is more along the lines of what will Portugal, Spain, and Italy have to do with their gold if Cyprus is made to sell? Of course Cyprus is denying that they plan to sell, and from some stuff I’ve read, EU rules constrain central banks from selling gold holdings to finance debt.
And, oh yeah, China’s growth is underperforming so that may be a part of this too. People seem to be heading for T-Bills in a big way.
nellcote
@jibeaux:
Is the rise of Bitcoins causing gold to crash?
Calouste
@The Moar You Know:
Rather than currency backed by precious metals, I prefer currency backed by base metals like lead, steel and depleted uranium.
ericblair
@nellcote:
I’m going to buy a gold-plated Beanie Baby with a bitcoin just to watch the world implode.
Oh yeah, as of right now gold is down exactly 9.11% today. WAKE UP SHEEPLE
catclub
@Calouste: How about plutonium and deuterium?
fuckwit
@nellcote: Yes. It’s the same people.
Roger Moore
@Calouste:
FTFY.
BruceJ
@Mark B.:
Sounds a lot like Arthur Clarke’s story “Nine Billion Names of God” and it’s immortal last line “overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.”
ankh hotep
“Wait, is there free money here?” someone asks.
Did someone ask about Free Money? A smart promoter would put this on a double feature with The Magic Christian. Ringo elegantly demonstrates the irresistible allure of Free Money.