First off, they both suck.
Second is why. In RedLetterMedia’s epic review of the Star Wars prequels, one of the first plot points he assails is that two Jedi Knights were sent to resolve a dispute over the taxation of trade routes. It’s bad enough that this is the plot, and RLM has covered that. What’s worse is *why* this is the plot, and I haven’t heard anybody yet put the shoe leather to George Lucas’ backside on this score. Allow me.
Lucas is a progressive’s progressive, and it shows in his progressive movies. When you hear conservatives complain about leftist bias in all over the culture, but they can’t explain why, this is precisely the sort of thing we’re talking about.
The Jedi Council sends two knights to resolve a dispute over the taxation of trade routes. Why on Earth would they do that? Not because they are experts in this sort of thing, or even care–it is obvious that they do not care, that the council does not care, and that most certainly George Lucas does not care. This is just another insert-problem-here scriptwriter’s story biscuit like all the plot devices that need Geordi LaForge to fix them over on Star Trek by beaming something, anything, out the lateral array.
The reason these lightsaber-toting pack mules for plot points are sent is because all of the parties to the dispute are deemed incapable of solving this problem through methods which are acceptable to the Jedi Council. The Knights are not experts in any of this, but it is their other qualities which will enable them to best resolve the issue. This is a two-fold attack on markets and market forces, and here’s why:
First off, it is obviously a substitution of a regulatory process for an evolved one. Of course those involved in a dispute over the taxation of trade routes may all be assumed to have an economic stake, even if nothing else, and this would make it a battle of market forces, with or without a formal “Market” on which to buy stock or trade shares.
Second, and a bit more subtly, that substition is seen as superior from a good guys’ perspective, and a leftist do-gooder’s perspective of a good guy at that. We may fairly assume that the Jedi Council’s goal in this (as in all things, brother) is to maximize happiness for a maximum number, that is, the utilitarian good. At least, I would like to see somebody argue against that. So the market forces which would otherwise have jostled for a resolution to this issue are seen not only as insufficient to generate a good result, but as unsuitable to the task.
If market forces were the right sort of solution to this impasse, these two fools would not have been sent–businessmen would have. Better businessmen than those currently trying to settle the issue. This is a difference of kind, not of degree, and while it can be difficult to tell them apart–this is the phantom menace.
By positing that market forces are the wrong tool
Some points:
- The leftist desire to avoid small wars will result in large ones.
- The leftist’s elevation of their wishes over reality makes them easily manipulated by bad guys.
- It also makes them bad guys who manipulate others into perpetuating a version of things which is simply not true. It engenders complicity through shared culpability.
- The leftists see themselves as a more enlightened, more noble sort, who may be relied upon to impartially mediate disputes.
- The ability to solve problems to their own satisfaction is theirs alone, and therefore the right to do so is theirs alone.
- So was it an allegory for the American Revolutionary War? At least in the inciting situation?
- The Bad Guys will always try to cheat, outsmart, kill the good guys when it is in their interest to do so. Successful societies find ways to reduce any benefit from this behavior to less than it costs. Unsuccessful ones attempt to stay ahead of bad guys, which requires vastly more resources and requires significant restrictions on liberty.
- You can argue that it all means nothing, and that I am simply over-worrying a bunch of silly plot points to a movie which was successful after all in liberating hundreds of millions of dollars from tens of millions of pockets. But it all goes in a single direction, and if it truly doesn;t matter, then why try? If it truly doesn;t matter, then why bother to say that it’s a dispute over taxation of trade routes? Why make it about the galactic equivalents of structures we find right here on modern-day earth? Would the Jedi not be better employed trying to ensure that the peaceful merchants of Naboo are free from the meddlesome and oppressive measures of confiscatory government policies? I understand that the Republic was seen as the good government before becoming the evil Empire, but is this supposed to be a matter of degree?
- The “Trade Federation” is supposed to be big business, and it’s not businesses or the citizenry on Naboo that are suffering–it’s the government. The government will no longer be able to provide critical goods and services of [whatever] if the blockade is successful. Presumably, this dispute and blockade are about the Trade Federation either not being given an easy time of taxes or driving an impossible price line on the poor struggling government of Queen Amygdala.
