AIRPORT ‘SECURITY’?

BY THOMAS SOWELL

The unconstitutionally invasive new airport security measures in the US are not only illegal, but doomed to be ineffective. Why, then, do the powers that be insist on going forward?

No country has better airport security than Israel — and no country needs it more, since Israel is the most hated target of Islamic extremist terrorists. Yet, somehow, Israeli airport security people don’t have to strip passengers naked electronically or have strangers feeling their private parts.

Does anyone seriously believe that we have better airport security than Israel? Is our security record better than theirs?

“Security” may be the excuse being offered for the outrageous things being done to American air travelers, but the heavy-handed arrogance and contempt for ordinary people that is the hallmark of this administration in other areas is all too painfully apparent in these new and invasive airport procedures.

Can you remember a time when a Cabinet member in a free America boasted of having his “foot on the neck” of some business or when the President of the United States threatened on television to put his foot on another part of some citizens’ anatomy?

Yet this and more has happened in the current administration, which is not yet two years old. One Cabinet member warned that there would be “zero tolerance” for “misinformation” when an insurance company said the obvious, that the mandates of ObamaCare would raise costs and therefore raise premiums. Zero tolerance for exercising the First Amendment right of free speech?

More than two centuries ago, Edmund Burke warned about the dangers of new people with new power. This administration, only halfway through its term, has demonstrated that in many ways.

What other administration has had an Attorney General call the American People “cowards”? And refuse to call terrorists Islamic? What other administration has had a Secretary of Homeland Security warn law enforcement officials across the country of security threats from people who are anti-abortion, for federalism or are returning military veterans?

If anything good comes out of the airport “security” outrages, it may be in opening the eyes of more people to the utter contempt that this administration has for the American people.

Those who made excuses for all of candidate Barack Obama’s long years of alliances with people who expressed their contempt for this country, and when as president he appointed people with a record of antipathy to American interests and values, may finally get it when they feel some stranger’s hand in their crotch.

As for the excuse of “security,” this is one of the least security-minded administrations we have had. When hundreds of illegal immigrants from terrorist-sponsoring countries were captured crossing the border from Mexico — and then released on their own recognizance within the United States, that tells you all you need to know about this administration’s concern for security.

When captured terrorists who are not covered by either the Geneva Convention or the Constitution of the United States are nevertheless put on trial in American civilian courts by the Obama Justice Department, that too tells you all you need to know about how concerned they are about national security.

The rules of criminal justice in American courts were not designed for trying terrorists. For one thing, revealing the evidence against them can reveal how our intelligence services got wind of them in the first place, and thereby endanger the lives of people who helped us nab them.

Not a lot of people in other countries, or perhaps even in this country, are going to help us stop terrorists if their role is revealed and their families are exposed to revenge by the terrorists’ bloodthirsty comrades.

What do the Israeli airport security people do that American airport security do not do? They profile. They question some individuals for more than half an hour, open up all their luggage and spread the contents on the counter — and they let others go through with scarcely a word. And it works.

Meanwhile, this administration is so hung up on political correctness that they have turned “profiling” into a bugaboo. They would rather have electronic scanners look under the clothes of nuns than to detain a Jihadist imam for some questioning.

Will America be undermined from within by an administration obsessed with political correctness and intoxicated with the adolescent thrill of exercising its new-found powers? Stay tuned.


Thomas Sowell is a Senior Fellow at The Hoover Institution at Stanford University in California. He has published dozens of books on economics, education, race, and other topics. His most recent book is The Housing Boom and Bust, from April 2009.

PUTTING OBAMACARE ON ICE

BY LOGAN CLEMENTS

Mass media is a powerful tool for disseminating ideas to the public. And now, a great new movie and business opportunity is available to help quash support for ObamaCare.

Like all progressive legislation, ObamaCare poses as a cure for the malfeasance of the market. We’ve heard the proclamation, repeated often enough, that “if you like your health insurance you can keep it.” This is a cruel joke, but only those with the inclination and understanding will get the punchline — there won’t be any health insurance market when ObamaCare is done.

More importantly, there won’t be much in the way of good healthcare either. Doctors may be smart, drugs miraculous, and procedures life-saving, but it will all be flat-lined when decisions about your medical care are based on political considerations and Marxist ideology.

To change the political reality of a society, you need to change the ideas first and the politicians last. Most ideas percolate in the universities before being served to the public. Unfortunately, America’s universities are dominated by post-modernist ideology that pollutes all points downriver, assuring that simply replacing a current crop of politicians at the bottom will be futile. We need to win the war of ideas, the air war, if we ever want to gain and keep ground (or water), rather than just swapping it back and forth every six years.

I look forward to the day when tenured Marxist professors end up with offices and class schedules in some of the less cozy parts of the Aleutian Islands. But replacing the forges of America’s mind-factories will take decades. Until then, we can win the war at slightly lower altitude using mass media.

Movies in particular serve as a powerful platform to take the ammunition produced by free-market authors and think tanks to win the public debate. Few people would want to read a public policy book about healthcare, but who wouldn’t want to see me rent a Canadian hospital and have a sexy girl chased by a beaver?

My new movie, “Sick and Sicker: ObamaCare Canadian Style,” has a simple mission; to show Americans where ObamaCare will take us. It’s a world where politicians try to reduce health care costs by reducing access to healthcare itself. “What’s driving all these costs?” the bureaucrats asked. Doctors, of course. Doctors perform operations, doctors write prescriptions, and doctors consult with patients.

So in the early 1990s, the health bureaucrats in Canada paid doctors to quit practicing medicine. A doctor shortage ensued. Now over 4 million Canadians don’t have a family doctor. And the system is rigged so that you can’t see a specialist without a referral from a family doctor. The family doctor is the bouncer at Club Savoir Life.

The irony is excruciating. While the entire system was created to take “money out of medicine,” nothing factors more into each decision than the cost. Five of the cancer patients I interviewed complained that they were refused the best and most timely treatments due to cost. They all died before my movie was finished.

I was impressed by their courage to speak out. Most Canadians are afraid to talk, and why wouldn’t they be? If they speak out, their own access to medicine, or that of a relative, could be cut off. One person I wanted to interview told me exactly this. Her father died of a treatable heart condition while stuck on a government waiting list. But she didn’t want to say anything, because another relative was seeking treatment and she feared retribution.

Actually, I’d like to provide a second opinion. There is one thing besides cost that is king in system of PolitiCare, and that’s the kings themselves and their desire to stay on top. You see, patients are treated not by hospital buildings, but by the doctors and nurses working inside those buildings. However in a PolitiCare system, the politicians get re-elected by having a new hospital built in their district, even if their vote to retire doctors leaves those buildings half empty.

Remember when the Soviet Union was on its last legs, and the Soviet air force earned some extra vodka money by selling rides on its jets? Well, it’s kind of like that.  While more than 800,000 Canadians are stuck on waiting lists, large sections of many Canadian hospitals sit empty. What do they do with this empty space? Of course, they rent it out to movie producers to make a little extra money. I felt obliged to take them up on their offer. As I say, “What would Borat do?”

Now the real challenge is getting this movie in front of regular Americans and Canadians. Yet therein lies a common bond between medicine and movies. Both need profits to thrive. So I’m attempting to create a new way for movies to get past the left-wing bottleneck of Hollywood distribution. I want those battling ObamaCare in America and socialized medicine in Canada to make money, lots of money, by showing my movie.

From today until January 31, 2011 anyone (tea partier, Ayn Rand fan, doctor, nurse, Republican or just patriotic person) can become an official screener of my movie for $500. Download it to your laptop computer, plug it into regular projector and get fifty people to watch it for $10.  Congratulations, you just broke even.  Now, keep showing it as many times as you can and make as much money as you can until January 31. But don’t worry, if you live in a remote part of the Aleutian Islands, you can just download a single user version for $5.

Find both versions of the movie at SickAndSickerMovie.com.


Logan Darrow Clements is the former publisher of American Venture magazine. In 2005, he fought eminent domain abuse by trying to take the house of a Supreme Court justice who helped unleash it. Clements’s next movie is already underway, and covers eminent domain battles up close. You can watch trailers and short videos at FreestarMedia.com, including one of a monkey beating Social Security’s return rate with some darts.

Interviews with the creators of the new Atlas Shrugged movie

In addition to our own new interview with Atlas Shrugged movie producer John Aglialoro, also check out this interview with screenwriter Brian Patrick O’Toole.
One noteworthy exchange:

Ã?therCzar: The production of Atlas Shrugged has been criticized for its relatively low budget and lack of famous acting talent. Do you believe these factors have compromised your ability to bring Ayn Randâ??s story to the screen?
Brian Oâ??Toole: Why is it that everyone on the Internet, when talking about our production of ATLAS SHRUGGED-PART ONE, seem to fixate on the â??low budgetâ?? It puzzles me. Five million dollars is still a lot of money.
We made ATLAS SHRUGGED-PART ONE independently â?? in every sense of that word. John Aglialoro personally financed the film so that the story could be told without studio executive pressure to make the story more Hollywood-friendly, which I believe he encountered in his past dealings to have the book brought to the screen. I think itâ??s heroic that someone would put up their own money to finance something that obviously means a lot to them. Itâ??s something to be respected. To me, thatâ??s the story people should be focusing on, not who the actors are and how much the movie cost.
As for the lack of star power behind the names in the film, I think itâ??s a bit ridiculous. I canâ??t believe audiences would rather say â??Wow, Julia Roberts did a great job portraying Dagny Taggartâ? than be involved in the journey that the character takes in the story as portrayed by a very gifted actress like Taylor Schilling.
There was a story in the Los Angeles Times recently about a television production that was paying each of its writers $200,000 a week and yet they were not required to write a single word until Spring 2011. This is a good example as to why Hollywood productions are out of control.
When you use money efficiently and wisely, and you hire a crew that is imaginative and thinks out of the box and not from the checkbook, youâ??ll be surprised by the quality you can get up on the screen. In my opinion, the budget was exactly right for this film, so, please everybody, stop worrying how much the film cost to make and enjoy the show.

See the full interview for much more.

JOHN AGLIALORO ON THE ATLAS SHRUGGED MOVIE

BY JOSHUA ZADER

Producer John Aglialoro answers some key questions for the Atlasphere: How is the screenplay different from earlier drafts? How did the filming go? When will the movie be released? What’s in that 10-minute preview clip being shown next month in NYC?

Who is John Aglialoro? Probably no one since Ayn Rand has invested so much in Atlas Shrugged. For nearly two decades he has championed the novel — financially, intellectually, logistically — because he was determined to make a movie that would do justice to Rand’s masterpiece.

Ranked by Forbes Small Business as the 10th richest executive of any small publicly-traded company (revenues under $200 million) in 2007, Aglialoro is one of those rare corporate executives who fully “gets” the philosophical message in Atlas Shrugged. And he wants the rest of the world to get it, too — by seeing it on the big screen.

After fifteen years of negotiations and discussions with networks and major studios, in 2007 it finally seemed his efforts would pay off. A version of the movie produced by Lionsgate Entertainment, with Angelina Jolie starring as Dagny Taggart, looked as if it would enter production.

In an article at the Atlasphere, Robert James Bidinotto reviewed those plans in some detail, and saw reason for hope. We published a short interview with Aglialoro around that time as well. According to one rumor, however, the real-life Jolie proved rather less dependable than her fictional counterpart, and the Lionsgate plans fell through.

After further discussions with studios made it clear none were prepared to act within an acceptable timeframe, Aglialoro made a bold decision. As Chairman and CEO of exercise equipment producer Cybex International, he was no stranger to the challenges of managing a massive budget and meeting a hard deadline. By May 2010, faced with the prospect that his rights to the movie would soon expire, he and Harmon Kaslow elected to dispense with major studios altogether and underwrite the movie themselves as an independent production.

With no studio bosses to interfere with the integrity of the story, Aglialoro recruited Brian Patrick O’Toole to create a new script (learn more here) that would closely follow the original novel. And this time, Aglialoro himself would make sure the movie got made.

 

Taylor Schilling (of Mercy) plays Dagny Taggart

Filming started on June 12th and entered post-production on July 25th.

 

The movie stars Taylor Schilling (of Mercy) as Dagny Taggart, Grant Bowler (of True Blood) as Hank Rearden, and director Paul Johansson (of One Tree Hill) as the novel’s hero, John Galt — whose face is, reportedly, never shown in the movie.

The movie’s Facebook fan page has grown rapidly as screenwriter Brian O’Toole posts behind-the-scenes photos from the set and members try to guess what scenes from the novel are being depicted.

Aglialoro’s decision to make the film himself, with no help from Hollywood studios, has generated plenty of controversy. Was it a rash choice unlikely to yield good results? Or an example of just the sort of no-excuses reliability and determination exemplified by the heroes in Atlas Shrugged itself?

 

You can judge for yourself. Next month, at the December 7th event “Atlas Shrugged: The Making of a Movie” in New York City, fans of Atlas Shrugged will have a chance to not only hear Aglialoro talk but also see a 10-minute clip from the movie. Aglialoro is a longtime trustee of The Atlas Society, which is hosting the event.

In anticipation of this event and the movie’s release early next year, Aglialoro agreed to answer some questions for Atlasphere readers.

The Atlasphere: You’ve been working to bring Atlas Shrugged to the screen for seventeen years. During that time, you’ve faced many ups and downs. What has kept you going for such a long time?

John Aglialoro: Let me give you some background first. I had purchased a fifteen-year lease to make a movie of the book in August 1992 from Leonard Peikoff, now the former chairman of the Ayn Rand Institute. I wanted to outsource the project to a studio, a financing group, or some party who would see what an excellent opportunity it was.

Grant Bowler (from True Blood) as Hank Rearden

 

Over the years there were some great names in the industry who were interested in the project. But year after year passed, and it got to the point where I had to make a decision to finance it myself — and to arrange for the casting and get it done — or lose the movie rights altogether.

One thing that kept me going was that many years back I had made a kind of commitment to Ayn Rand herself. I didn’t make it to her one-on-one personally, although I had actually seen her once, when she gave her last talk at the Ford Hall Forum in 1981. But making the movie was something that I felt as an Objectivist I could carry out one way or another. I wanted to be able to visit Ayn Rand’s grave in New York and say, “We got it done.”

 

John Aglialoro with his wife, Joan Carter Aglialoro

In April of this year I had to make a decision about whether to pursue the project and get filming going by the middle of June or to let my lease on the movie expire.

 

My wife pointed out that if I didn’t do it, it would haunt me for the rest of my life.

And that did it.

TA: You’ve been a successful entrepreneur and now you’ve produced a movie. What challenges did you face in the latter role? How is making a movie different from or similar to running a business?

Aglialoro: In business you need a vision and a team with a strategy, and you need the capital. For the movie we had the vision and the capital. We just needed to gather a team together, although we had a very short runway leading up to the filming. But I found the same elements involved in this project that I had found from owning various types of businesses.

Several years ago my kids gave my wife and me a Monopoly game with various properties or companies we had bought or sold over the years substituted for the ones in the game. The names might be different, but the dynamics of businesses and projects are the same.

One difference between many business enterprises and making the movie was the very short time span we had to pull it together and start filming. June 15, 2010 was the deadline when my option on making the movie would run out. As the date got closer I asked the estate, owned by Leonard Peikoff, for an extension. For whatever reason that he thought it was in his self-interest, he kept us to that deadline. So the last three weeks or so leading up to the deadline were mostly sleepless nights.

 

The Taggart Transcontinental seal, perhaps in the concourse of the Taggart Terminal?

 

TA: In recent years, Randall Wallace and others have each taken a crack at the Atlas script. Since you opted for a trilogy in this latest version, you could obviously include a lot more material from the book. How else is it different from these earlier scripts?

Aglialoro: Actually, there were some six or seven different scripts through the years when I was trying to make the movie. In 2006 we signed a contract with Lionsgate, and they hired Randall Wallace. He wrote an excellent script. It was for a two-and-a-quarter- or two-and-a-half-hour movie of the whole book, and it was amazing to me how he did it. Some of the other scripts had their great points but fell short to some degree. But the Wallace script really made it.

 

Taylor Schilling as Dagny Taggart, Vice-President in Charge of Operations for Taggart Transcontinental

The movie was budgeted at perhaps $70 million. They got Geyer Kosinski, the manager of Angelina Jolie, as well as Jolie herself and a number of other stars connected to the project.

 

Unfortunately, the leadership at that studio couldn’t see fit to carry out that vision of the movie. Ultimately, whether it was politics or something about the storyline or whatever, they didn’t want to put the capital behind the project.

So in the end, in the time and budget we had to make the movie, we simply were not able to carry out Randy Wallace’s script. It would have been a huge undertaking.

The idea for a trilogy came from the talk of a miniseries, which Ayn Rand herself at one point said would be a good idea. We spoke with people at HBO as well as Epic, a new channel connected to Lionsgate.

The latter wanted Atlas Shrugged to be their first large and inaugural work. But that possibility fell through back in February or March of this year.

 

 

 

We couldn’t do a miniseries without a TV station backing the project and we couldn’t do it as a big-budget movie without a studio. So we decided to have a script that pretty much followed the book. The book is in three parts, and 27 percent of the book is part one. We ended part one right at the point where Ellis Wyatt leaves, and it had a tidy ending with a full expectation of the future events.

 

The offices of Taggart Transcontinental

 

TA: After completing the filming, what are you most pleased with about the movie?

Aglialoro: I’m pleased that we pulled it off. And that we have an entertaining movie based on such an important book. We had Paul Johansson as director and we had a great team. We asked Brian O’Toole to take a truly great book and faithfully adapt it as a near-great script for Paul and the team to bring to the screen. That effort was successful, and we shot the film in just under six weeks.

There were some changes to the script along the way, and some things I would have liked to have had added. Those who know the book will remember the scene with Phillip Rearden and his mother going to Hank Rearden’s office to ask for a job for Phillip. I thought that would have made a fabulous little two-minute scene. But we were trying to do so much already that various circumstances kept us from doing everything we would have liked.

 

Matthew Marsden as James Taggart

 

It was very expensive shooting every day. You’re changing aspects of the script to adapt to realities on the set, and in some cases actors who were not on the set because they were traveling or had other obligations. So it was difficult to bring all of these hundred-and-one things together every day, but I was pleased that we carried it out. And it’s an entertaining movie.

 

 

 

 

 

TA: Johansson seems like a passionate individual. How would you describe his style as a director?

Aglialoro: Paul is a hands-on, take-charge kind of guy, and he worked very well with the actors.

Remember, many of these actors came on at a minimum rate just because they wanted to be associated with the project. There was not a lot of rehearsal time. Normally actors get weeks or months to study the nuances of their characters, but for this project time was very short. Paul was able to get them focused on their roles right away.

 

Paul Johansson (of One Tree Hill) directs the movie and plays John Galt, though reportedly his face is never shown

 

I remember we were schooling Taylor Shilling right up to the last several hours in the last evening before shooting in the characterization of Dagny Taggart. She’s got that tall, thin look with a tight-lipped smile that’s very beautiful. She’s a big talent.

 

 

 

 

 

 

In fact, she’s now in New Orleans and about halfway through a three-month shoot on a movie with Zac Efron, a very famous young actor these days. I’m sure they know she’s just finished up Atlas Shrugged, and her reputation should be great for our movie when it comes out.

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TA: Is the movie still on track for a March release — or June, if accepted at a major festival?

Aglialoro: My initial and lingering aspiration was to have February 2, Ayn Rand’s birthday, be the date when it opens. And I recently saw Night of January 16th, Ayn Rand’s play that ran on Broadway in the ‘60s. So I wanted to have a private movie premiere the night of January 16, 2011, and a couple weeks later have the opening.

That sounds so tidy and poetically justifiable, but I think we’re going to have to take a look at March or April. No later than Tax Day, April 15.

 

Grant Bowler and Taylor Schilling as Hank Rearden and Dagny Taggart

TA: Some people think there’s no way you can do Atlas Shrugged justice with a $5 to $10 million budget. What do you say to them?

 

Aglialoro: The full budget is actually much bigger. Remember that in August 1992 I had paid a million dollars or so to Leonard Peikoff for the movie rights. You do add the rights costs to the costs of the movie.

And then there were additional costs along the way. Jim Hart did a very nice script early on. He also wrote Hook and Contact. There were other versions of the script. And there were a lot of other development costs — meetings, travel, legal fees. Those costs since 1992 run between $10 and $15 million.

I think the production costs for this movie are going to run about $10 million. And then we’ll have the marketing costs and some small return on capital.

If the movie does come out in the middle of April we will be costing it right up until then. We still have a fair number of people on the payroll. So we’re looking at total costs of $25 million or more.

But also look at what we got with our production budget. For example, we used red camera technology to film it. It creates digital images rather than images on film. Its software is great for editing. We were able to get the director’s cut of the movie and add some very good visual scenes and other elements in weeks rather than the months it would have taken with film. So it is high tech, and we didn’t scrimp on using red camera.

We also used a fair amount of green screens where we were able to insert some great visual effects and breathtaking scenes. After the director’s cut we had a team that went out to Colorado for two weeks to shoot mountains, valleys, railroads, moving trains, tracks, all sorts of things. I had one professional studio head take a look at the movie, and we think it has the look and feel of a movie with $30 million in production costs.

 

A scene from the movie that uses green screen

 

TA: Are there other independent films with a similar budget, from which you drew inspiration for this project? Or did you just do what you had to do?

Aglialoro: I just did what I had to do. As I’ve said, we had the opportunity to hire many of the actors and others at perhaps 25 percent of what they normally make. I mean when you get a famous actor for a movie, you might have a $30 million price right there.

We had some excellent talent and a few of the actors were journeymen who had done a hundred movies, and they came in at minimum. A lot of people wanted to work on this project. I was stunned.

 

 

If we had had to pay just standard or going rate for cameramen, production designers, and all of these various parts of a movie, this budget would have doubled. So we got lucky.

 

The Old Wyatt Junction Bridge, during a tech scout

 

TA: When will you start filming part two?

Aglialoro: When part one is finished and released. I’m being told I’ll have a lot of options then. Obviously if the movie is successful, as we expect it will be, we should have a few of the larger studios interested in buying the rights and guaranteeing production budgets.

 

 

 

 

 

 

If they see a profitable, successful, and well-done part one, the studios will have the confidence to invest in the later parts. Or we might use our team — we call ourselves Strike Productions, through the corporate heading of Atlas Film Productions — to produce the next parts.

These are still big question marks. We’ll have to see.

 

The prop used as James Taggart’s toy train set in his office is a 1950s relic itself worth over $25,000

 

TA: The country seems thirsty for the vision that Ayn Rand presented in Atlas Shrugged. What effects would you hope the movie would have in our culture?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Aglialoro: I hope that the political class will be replaced by political leaders with the sense of our Founding Fathers. This is the notion of reluctantly, with great pain and suffering, leaving their farm and their town in order to put two long years into elected office out of gratitude for having the freedom to make their way in the world, to be successful, and to get up every morning and do whatever their sense of life dictates.

 

Dagny and James Taggart, a Portrait

Those are the kinds of political leaders and statesmen who had self-love and love of their country. Today we have people getting out of law school, entering the political class, making a career in government, garnering power, doing all the things that they must do to stay in office and get reelected.

 

They have only a vague motivation, if any, to get society moving in the direction where individuals control their own destinies, where government takes a limited approach to governing.

An obvious solution to this problem would be term limits. If terms were restricted we wouldn’t have career politicians with incentives to concentrate more and more power in government so they can pass out money and favors in their bids for reelection.

 

 

 

 

That’s my hope. It’s a big hope, but we do see that some of the elected folks today seem to be more libertarian and have a great respect for Ayn Rand. So maybe we’re at the beginning of a five- or seven- or eight-decade trend where we repopulate the awful and disgusting political elements that rule Congress, the states, and the regulatory bodies today.

TA: On December 7, in New York, you’ll be speaking at the event “Atlas Shrugged: The Making of a Movie” and showing a clip from the movie. What will we be seeing in this clip?

Aglialoro: We’re going to show the first ten minutes of the actual movie. I can’t be more specific than that, because we’re still in post-production.

 

 

 

 

 

The movie is shot and the film is locked, which means the scenes themselves — what is said, what is shot, external scenes, internal dialogue, with the exception of dubbing and things like that — are as they’ll be in the movie. We now are working on the sound, color, and lighting — a multi-week process. And the actors are contracted to come in for a day or two for any dubbing that may be necessary.

I can tell you that the movie opens in a diner, and on the diner’s TV, on CNBC, we see Wesley Mouch and James Taggart in a studio, and from a remote feed is Ellis Wyatt, as three talk show guests discussing oil and other current events.

And while that dialogue is going on we see in the diner Midas Mulligan. Here we’ve taken some liberties. In the book, at this time in the story, Mulligan was actually out of the picture and in Atlantis.

In the movie we have him leaving the diner, and shortly thereafter a figure — who I won’t name right now — speaks to him and then the scene just cuts.

We’ve had several people from the Objectivist movement see the rough cut of the movie, including Atlas Society founder David Kelley, who actually helped with the some of the script analysis.

So I can’t say exactly what ten minutes you’ll see on December 7, but I’m sure the audience will like it. I hope to see a lot of Atlasphere members there.


Publisher’s note (8 Dec 2010) – Read Richard Gleave’s review for the Atlasphere of what was shown in the ten-minute video clip and what it portends for the final movie.

DEFICIT REDUCTION

BY THOMAS SOWELL

Appointing a ‘deficit reduction commission’ in times of economic crisis is a favorite political show.  But do we really need another layer of bureaucracy to explain basic math?

Another deficit reduction commission has now made its recommendations. My own recommendation for dealing with deficits would include stopping the appointment of deficit reduction commissions.

It is not the amount of money that these commissions cost that is the issue. It is the escape hatch that they provide for big-spending politicians.

Do you go ahead and spend the rent money and the food money — and then ask somebody else to tell you how to escape the consequences?

If President Obama or the Congress were serious about keeping the deficit down, they could have had this commission’s recommendations before they spent hundreds of billions of dollars, handing out goodies hither and yon to their pet constituencies.

I don’t know why people agree to serve on these bipartisan commissions, which save the political hides of the big spenders after they have run up huge deficits. Back in the 1950s, there was a saying: “If you didn’t invite me to the take-off, don’t invite me to the crash landing.”

Deficit commissions make it politically possible to spend money first and get somebody else to recommend raising taxes later. They are a virtual guarantee of never-ending increases in both spending and taxes.

Why provide political cover? Leave the big spenders out there naked in front of the voters! Either the elected officials will change their ways or the voters can change the officials they elect.

There is no special information or wisdom available to unelected deficit commissions that is not available to elected officials. Nor are they more far-seeing than politicians.

Cutting defense spending to save money? That is one of the oldest moves in the liberal play book. Some soldiers may pay with their lives for this, but that could be years from now — and after the next election, which is as far as most politicians think.

The biggest immediate tax issue is whether the Bush tax cuts will be extended for everyone. Here, as elsewhere in politics, sheer hogwash reigns supreme.

Nancy Pelosi claims that the “tax cuts for the rich” cannot be continued because it would be “too costly.” Although former Republican Majority Leader Dick Armey says, “Demagoguery beats data” in politics, here are some data anyway.

The first big cut in income taxes came in the 1920s, at the urging of Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon. He argued that a reduction of the tax rates would increase the tax revenues. What actually happened?

In 1920, when the top tax rate was 73 percent, for people making over $100,000 a year, the federal government collected just over $700 million in income taxes — and 30 percent of that was paid by people making over $100,000. After a series of tax cuts brought the top rate down to 24 percent, the federal government collected more than a billion dollars in income tax revenue — and people making over $100,000 a year now paid 65 percent of the taxes.

How could that be? The answer is simple: People behave differently when tax rates are high as compared to when they are low. With low tax rates, they take their money out of tax shelters and put it to work in the economy, benefitting themselves, the economy and government, which collects more money in taxes because incomes rise.

High tax rates which very few people are actually paying, because of tax shelters, do not bring in as much revenue as lower tax rates that people are paying. It was much the same story after tax cuts during the Kennedy administration, the Reagan administration and the Bush Administration.

The New York Times reported in 2006: “An unexpectedly steep rise in tax revenues from corporations and the wealthy is driving down the projected budget deficit this year.”

Expectations are in the eyes of the beholder — and in the rhetoric of the demagogues. If class warfare is more important to some politicians than collecting more revenue when there is a deficit, then let the voters know that.

And spare us so-called “deficit reduction commissions.”


Thomas Sowell is a Senior Fellow at The Hoover Institution at Stanford University in California. He has published dozens of books on economics, education, race, and other topics. His most recent book is The Housing Boom and Bust, from April 2009.

HOW TO CONTROL CONGRESS

BY WALTER E WILLIAMS

With deficits today soaring, it might be time to look at a Constitutional amendment to rein in government spending. However, this will prove to be an uphill battle.

Let’s assume that each of our 535 congressmen cares about the destructive impact of deficits and debt on the future of our country. Regardless of party, congressmen face enormous lobbying pressures and awards to spend more and little or no pressure and awards to spend less. The nation’s founders would be horrified by today’s congressional spending that consumes 25 percent of our GDP.

Contrast that to the years 1787 to the 1920s when federal government spending never exceeded 4 percent of our GDP except in wartime. Today, federal, state and local government consumes 43 percent of what Americans produce each year. The Washington, D.C.-based Tax Foundation computes that the average taxpayer is forced to work from Jan. 1 to mid-April to pay federal, state and local taxes. If he were taxed enough to pay the $1.5 trillion federal deficit, he’d be forced to work until mid-May.

Tax revenue is not the problem. The federal government has collected just about 20 percent of the nation’s GDP almost every year since 1960. Federal spending has exceeded revenue for most of that period and has taken an unprecedented leap since 2008 to produce today’s massive deficit. Since federal spending is the problem, that’s where our focus should be.

Cutting spending is politically challenging. Every spending constituency sees its handout as vital, whether it’s Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid recipients or farmers, poor people, educators or the military. It’s easy for congressmen to say yes to these spending constituencies because whether it’s Democrats or Republicans in control, they face no hard and fast bottom line.

The bottom line that Americans need is a constitutional amendment limiting congressional spending to some fraction, say 20 percent, of the GDP. That limit could be exceeded only if the president declared a state of emergency along with a two-thirds vote of approval in both houses of Congress. Each year of a declared state of emergency would require another two-thirds vote in each house.

During the early ’80s, I was a member of the National Tax Limitation Committee’s distinguished blue-ribbon drafting committee that included notables such as Milton Friedman, James Buchanan, Paul McCracken, Bill Niskanen, Craig Stubblebine, Robert Bork, Aaron Wildavsky, Robert Nisbet, Robert Carleson and others. We drafted a Balanced Budget/Spending Limitation amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The U.S. Senate passed that amendment on Aug. 4, 1982, by a vote of 69 to 31, two more than the two-thirds vote required for approval of a constitutional amendment. The vote was bipartisan: 47 Republicans, 21 Democrats and 1 Independent voted for the amendment.

It was a different story in the House of Representatives. Its leadership, under Tip O’Neill tried to prevent a vote on the amendment; however, a discharge petition forced a vote on it. While the amendment was approved by a majority (236 to 187), it did not meet the two-thirds required by Article V of the Constitution. The vote was again bipartisan: 167 Republicans, 69 Democrats. The amendment can be found in Milton and Rose Friedman’s “Tyranny of the Status Quo.”

The benefit of a balanced budget/spending limitation amendment is that it would give Congress a bottom line just as we in the private sector have a bottom line. Congress would be forced to play one spending constituency off against another, rather than, as it does today, satisfy most spending constituents and pass the buck to the rest of us and future generations in the forms of federal deficits and debt.

The 1980s discussions settled on giving Congress a spending limit of 18 or 20 percent of our GDP. I thought a 10 percent limit was better. When queried by a reporter as to why 10 percent, I told him that if 10 percent is good enough for the Baptist Church, it ought to be good enough for Congress.


Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. He has authored more than 150 publications, including many in scholarly journals, and has frequently given expert testimony before Congressional committees on public policy issues ranging from labor policy to taxation and spending.

Scheduled maintenance on Monday morning

The Atlasphere will be down for maintenance for at least several hours early Monday morning, starting just after 12:00 a.m. ET. We’ll be implementing a long-awaited upgrade to the site’s design.
This site could be down for 6 to 8 hours, though probably less. During this time, you will see a page saying the site is down for maintenance and will not be able to access any other pages of the site.
Monday morning is a relatively low-traffic time for Atlasphere members, so hopefully not many of you will be inconvenienced. It should be well worth the wait… 🙂

CAN’T BUY YOU LOVE: MONEY IN POLITICS

BY JACOB SULLUM

The howling over how individuals and corporations spend their dollars in an attempt to influence politics reached a fever pitch this year. But was the fervor warranted?

Two months ago, The New York Times reported that “Democratic officials” believed “corporate interests, newly emboldened by regulatory changes,” were trying to “buy the election.” But it turned out the election was not for sale — at least, not to the highest bidder.

According to data collected by the Center for Responsive Politics, Democrats and Republicans each shelled out $1.6 billion during this election cycle, including spending by candidates, parties, party committees and independent groups. In terms of spending, the two parties were evenly matched. But that is not how it looked on election night.

A closer look provides further evidence that Republicans did not win by outspending their opponents. They got substantially more votes in House races, where they spent less than Democrats yet picked up more than 60 seats (and control of the chamber), than they did in Senate races, where they spent more than Democrats and added half a dozen seats.

The squandered money included $46 million that Linda McMahon, the Republican Senate candidate in Connecticut, spent out of her personal funds, which amounted to nearly $100 for each vote she received. She lost by 12 points. Less dramatically, John Raese, the Republican running for a Senate seat in West Virginia, spent $4.6 million of his own money ($20 per vote) and lost by 10 points.

But this year’s poster child for the lesson that money can’t buy you love is former eBay CEO Meg Whitman, who blew $140 million of her own money ($45 per vote) in her race for California governor against Democrat Jerry Brown, who won by 12 points. Also in California, a marijuana legalization initiative got more votes than Whitman but still lost by eight points, even though its supporters outspent its opponents by 10 to one.

At the other end of the spending spectrum, Slate’s Dave Weigel identified five House races in which extremely thrifty Republicans beat well-funded incumbents after raising far less than the $1 million that is commonly accepted as the threshold for a serious congressional campaign. Four of those Republicans also benefited from significant independent spending, ranging from about $200,000 to almost $1 million.

Analyses by The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal found that independent spending helped Republicans mainly by eroding (but not erasing) the financial advantage enjoyed by incumbents — whose re-election rate, even in this year of supposedly sweeping change, was still about 85 percent.

The role played by “shadowy groups with harmless-sounding names,” as President Obama describes organizations such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Karl Rove’s American Crossroads, should not be exaggerated, however. Money from independent groups, including those favoring Democrats as well as Republicans, came to about $293 million, less than one-tenth of the total.

The amount of independent spending was more than in any previous midterm year and nearly as much as in the last presidential election. But in a different political environment — one in which Democrats were less vulnerable and Republicans had less of a shot at seizing control of Congress — the impact of this spending might not even have been noticed. In a different political environment, of course, the money probably would not have been raised to begin with.

That consideration also makes it hard to evaluate the impact of Citizens United v. FEC, the January decision in which the Supreme Court dismayed Obama and other Democrats by overturning restrictions on the political speech of unions and corporations.

Some of this year’s ads — for example, messages sponsored by unions or nonprofit interest groups that amounted to “express advocacy” or its “functional equivalent” — would have been illegal prior to Citizens United. But much of the money that paid for those messages might otherwise have gone to groups that were already allowed to run campaign ads.

Money clearly matters in politics, because speech cannot travel very far without it. But as disastrously unsuccessful big spenders such as McMahon and Whitman vividly demonstrate, the ability to reach a wide audience does not guarantee that you will persuade anyone.


Jacob Sullum is a senior editor at Reason magazine, and his work appears in the new Reason anthology Choice (BenBella Books). Sullum is a graduate of Cornell University, where he majored in economics and psychology. He lives in Northern Virginia with his wife and daughter.

"Atlas Shrugged: The Making of a Movie" event in NYC on December 7, 2010

Want to see a ten-minute clip from the Atlas Shrugged movie, including the first scene from the movie? If you’re in New York City, you’ll get your chance on December 7th.
An announcement from the Atlas Society:

The Atlas Society is proud to present Atlas Shrugged: The Making of a Movie. After years of anticipation, John Aglialoro has completed filming Part I of what will be a trilogy. David Kelley, Atlas Society founder and CEO, consulted on a script that is true to the characters and philosophy of Ayn Randâ??s epic novel.
The program will feature a ten-minute, first-time viewing of an Atlas Shrugged film clip, which will include the first scene from the movie. Youâ??ll hear special remarks from producers John Aglialoro and Harmon Kaslow, Kelley, and select cast members. The event will be followed by a general cocktail reception. There will also be a VIP reception with an opportunity to meet and mingle with the producers and cast members.
Donâ??t miss this opportunity to celebrate the cinematic achievement of Aglialoro, Kaslow, and their team in bringing Randâ??s great literary achievement to the screen. Join us in the historic Hudson Theatre for an evening to remember.

See the full announcement for more information and registration details.
PS. Ed Hudgins sends the following information for Atlasphere members: Those who want to receive our lower member price can get an intro membership for $50 which will get them our quarterly, The New Individualist, newsletters, event discounts, and other goodies.