I’m a director. The job is despotic. You’re the boss of the production. You play god, the designer of the film/commercial/music video’s universe. When you’re good at it, as James Cameron or Oliver Stone or Woody Allen is, you create a window into a rich world that connects with people on an emotion, empathetic level. 

The great tragedy of brilliant designers is that some take this man-as-god complex a bit too seriously. Some clearly come to believe that because they can design a convincing world for a handful of characters from a narrow perspective for 2 hours, they (or someone they admire) can somehow handle the design of SOCIETY. I’m convinced that is the reason why so many gifted creative people are prone to central planning and central power.

Some recent articles highlight how frighteningly far this intellectual love of central power can go. First, there’s this shocking piece regarding Oliver Stone’s upcoming movie about Hugo Chavez:

Promoting his new documentary “South of the Border” in Caracas, Stone heaped praise on Chavez, saying he is leading a movement for “social transformation” in Latin American. The film features informal interviews by Stone with Chavez and six allied leftist presidents, from Bolivia’s Evo Morales to Cuba’s Raul Castro.

“I admire Hugo. I like him very much as a person. I can say one thing. … He shouldn’t be on television all the time,” Stone said at a news conference. “As a director I say you don’t want to be overpowering. And I think he is sometimes that way.”

Wow. Can you believe it? Mr. Stone, I’m sorry to say that you are aiding and abetting murderous evil, and in so doing, you’re rendering yourself an accomplice. Since Ollie decided to literally become this generations Leni Riefenstahl, I’d like to point out a few things that his upcoming propaganda will probably leave out.

#1. Hugo is crushing the working class with some of the highest inflation in two decades at 30%, even as the economy is shrinking fast. 

#2. Hugo’s pervasive price controls are causing food shortages in this oil rich nation.

#3. Hugo exercising tyrannical control over the local media.

#4. Hugo jails political dissidents and seems to have a problem with journalists getting murdered.

These are the facts. They are revolting. They demand revolution. They won’t be in Ollie’s filmic love song to a despot. 

Lucky for Oliver, he’s hardly alone in his love of totalitarianism. Woody Allen, whom I admire far more as a filmmaker, recently had this to say about our own president:

I think he’s brilliant. The Republican Party should get out of his way and stop trying to hurt him,” Allen explained. Then he waded into thorny terrain by saying, “It would be good … if he could be a dictator for a few years because he could do a lot of good things quickly.

I sure hope the director of Bananas (irony, anyone?) was joking, but jokes do have a way of revealing core beliefs. David Harsanyi did the work of collecting a few more lovers of allegedly “enlightened tyrants” including Thomas Friedman of the New York Times:

who pointed out (twice in recent months) that despotism can be advantageous if “enlightened” tyrants (in this case, environmentalists) would run the show.

“One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks,” according to Friedman. “But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages.”

When Paul Samuelson, legend of keynesian economics and rival to Milton Friedman, died, I posted about some of his choice quotes about tyrants. They’re worth repeating:

It seemed to me utterly incredible that an otherwise great economist could parrot idiotic Marxist propaganda. At a time when the magnitude of the Soviet economic disaster was apparent even to the most willfully blind Marxists in Central Europe and the USSR, the 1985 Samuelson text offered this paragraph about the Soviet economy:

But it would be misleading to dwell on the shortcomings. Every economy has its contradictions and difficulties with incentives—witness the paradoxes raised by the separation of ownership and control in America. . . . What counts is results, and there can be no doubt that the Soviet planning system has been a powerful engine for economic growth.

But, as it turned out, there hadn’t been any economic growth for years.

I find all of this completely repulsive and, frankly, evil. It’s evil. But it’s also inevitable. Socialism and state planning necessarily leads to tyranny in varying degrees and totalitarianism when pursued as Hugo Chavez is, like Stalin before him.

When the state plans, it MUST replace private individual plans. People are not chess pieces to be lined up by an enlightened despot, however. So when people don’t follow the plan, there is but one choice for the state planners to do: FORCE them to. Don’t want to buy health insurance? That’s no longer according to our central planners so, boom, were’s now legally forced to do so by the IRS men with guns. That’s no different than what Chavez is doing.

Hayek wrote at length about the role of Intellectuals and Socialism. The man was as wise as he was prolific…

…but what the hell do I know?