Quotes of the day

My theory, in a nutshell, is that it isn’t business that Hollywood doesn’t like (after all, Hollywood is a business) but capitalists. Filmmakers resent the capitalists for forcing them to make artistic tradeoffs for the sake of the bottom line, and this resentment comes out in the films. My paper shows the many ways this resentment is displayed in films. ... As I discuss in my article, one of the ways capitalist-resentment creeps into film is in the big role luck plays in the filmmakers’ version of business. After all, as I explain, “if financial success or failure depends on luck, or worse, it makes no sense for capitalists to force filmmakers to compromise their art to attract an audience. And when films fail financially, this cannot be the artists’ fault.” ... I note in the paper that “filmmakers might do better if they made more use of markets such as the Hollywood Stock Exchange,” citing Saul Levmore’s article, Simply Efficient Markets and the Role of Regulation: Lessons from the Iowa Electronic Markets and the Hollywood Stock Exchange, 28 J. CORP. L. 589 (2003). But one would expect this development to actually heighten filmmakers’ resentment: what could be worse than to show that you could actually predict which films would succeed and which would fail? So you can imagine filmmakers’ horror at the possible advent of new film futures markets ...--Larry Ribstein

Face it, most [Supreme Court] Justices know almost nothing about economics beyond an Econ 101 class they had as a college freshman three, four, five decades ago. And these are the people who decide what the commerce clause means ... the ones who made it illegal for a man to grow his own tomatoes without federal approval? Today we enjoy a Court that said it was peachy keen for the federal government to take ownership of General Motors on behalf of taxpayers who wouldn't touch GM stock of their own free will. To that, we can all say: "Thanks for less than nothing."--Tim Kane

Some people think George Bush’s biggest miscalculation was misjudging the intentions of Saddam Hussein. I think he got those exactly right, and it was Putin’s intentions that he sorely misjudged.--Jules Crittenden