Libertarians Are Really Onto Something

On the nature of an all-consuming politics.

“We have always known that eternal vigilance is the price of freedom. It’s worse now, because capture of government is so much more important than it once was. There was a time when there was enough freedom that it hardly mattered which brand of crooks ran government. That has not been true for a long time — not during most of your lifetimes, and for much of mine — and it will probably never be true again.”

This is a dangerous trend in all of American life. We are being gangsterized by bureaucrats and middlemen and lawyering ourselves to death. I can speak to examples in the entertainment industry as it is where my experience lies. If you are a creative, ie someone who actually makes shit, there are all sorts of incentives to get an agent, a manager, and a lawyer on your "team," since the other "team" ie studios and other employers have the same. So just in order to negotiate a smallish contract, the employee needs to pay 25% off the top to the "team." I have seen this over and over again with writers (my area), but I assume it applies to actors, directors, and below the line as well, but lawyers on both sides argue back and forth over minute elements in the contracts in order to justify their fees. Most of these items are pointless and could easily be standardized (especially when you are dealing with non-brand name people), yet we do it anyway. The studios will do it to bully the creatives and so the creatives are forced to jump on with one of the big law firms who can bully back.

What gets lost in this morass is several things. It de-incentives the lower end, ie new people. It kills a lot of our babies. The start up costs are difficult - no one wants to take flyers on new people because they hardly justify the amount of work. New people getting started earn a little bit of money and then pay well over 50% to taxes and representation. And it incentives busy-work over actually creative work. Sure, lots of scripts get commissioned and they are bad. But wouldn't it be a wiser expenditure of resources to take flyers on creative work than to pump that money into legal fees? I wish someone would do an accounting to see how much money ends up in the pockets of creatives vs. how much money ends up in the pockets of agents/lawyers/managers and then do another study taking away the very top 5% of mega-rich creatives like Spielberg, etc and then do the same study. I imagine it would be scary to see this breakdown - but it would be a revealing number to see how much money flows toward paperwork and deal making vs. creative processes. And I doubt it is a healthy number. I suppose it is probably worse in other industries.