May
8
2025

"He Said He Was From the Government, and Was Here To Help!"

And we know how that movie turns out, don't we?

At the WSJ, Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. gives two big thumbs-down for Trump’s Bad Hollywood Trade Movie (gifted link).

The stock market was apparently recovering too much confidence in the Donald Trump administration. He fixed that with his spontaneous 100% tariff on foreign movies.

No, it wouldn’t land on Americans the way some of his other tariff acts would. But his Sunday social-media post was an especially shimmering, Technicolor example of Mr. Trump messing with the economy and people’s livelihoods on whim, to satisfy his daily need of attention.

It isn’t what industry representatives were seeking to put U.S. production on an even tax footing with foreign locations.

It’s not practical—movies are digital services whose physical production process, to the extent it still exists, takes place everywhere and anywhere. How even to identify and tax the foreign content of intermediate products as they fly back and forth on the internet?

The instant outcome is already the opposite of the one intended. Nobody will finance a movie until the questions are answered.

This, from Giancarlo Sopo at NR, also explains a lot: Netflix’s CEO Wants You Lonely and Miserable. Excerpt (one that doesn't have much to do with that headline):

Box office returns are hardly a reliable measure of artistic value, but they do speak to our drift. In 2024, domestic ticket sales sank to $8.7 billion, a 23.5 percent drop from 2019, the last pre-pandemic benchmark. Annual admissions plummeted from 1.3 billion to just 800 million. Even the momentum of smash hits like Inside Out 2 and Deadpool & Wolverine faded fast. Theaters are open — but, more and more, they echo.

Ironically, Netflix helped build the very void it now treats as inevitable — a cultural ecosystem built not to nourish but to numb. This is the same company that lobbied to sideline The Count of Monte Cristo — a film that could have galvanized audiences beyond Europe — to prop up its gaudy narco-musical Emilia Pérez. Meanwhile, it relegates pre-1970 films — the golden age of cinema — to a digital shredder. In their place, with some exceptions, the platform is dominated by anti-art: focus-grouped “content” engineered for short attention spans.

Consumer note: I have purchased a ticket for the new live-action Lilo & Stitch, two weeks from today. In 3D! This will be the first time I've been to a theater since (see above) Twisters, back in July of last year.

I know: Disney. But the trailer made me laugh, and I have fond memories of the original animated version. So here's hoping it doesn't suck.

Also of note:

  • Sorry, Don: 50% is not a passing grade. Jonah Goldberg points to a continuing problem with Team Orange: Right Ends, Wrong Means.

    Perhaps the most frustrating thing about being a conservative critic of Trumpism is that you often start by agreeing with Trumpworld about ends while disagreeing about means.

    This pleases nobody. The left, broadly speaking, considers the ends as illegitimate as the means, and the pro-Trump right thinks that if you’re against the means you really don’t desire the ends. I’m against the abuse of power, even for my own “side.”

    For instance, I’ve argued for decades that liberal media bias is real and a problem. I think you can exaggerate the problem, particularly these days (Fox has dominated cable news for decades). But, yes, the MAGA crowd is right that much of the “legacy” media is often reflexively hostile to Republicans. But that doesn’t mean I support the way Trump’s Federal Communications Commission is bullying various media organizations for being critical of Trump, or that I applaud Trump’s jihad against the Associated Press for refusing to call the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.”

    Did anyone notice when Governor Ayotte started calling the "Gulf of Maine" the "Gulf of New Hampshire"? No? Maybe that was a dream I had.

  • But the real problem is neither means nor ends. It is, as Kevin D. Williamson says: Trump Is a Socialist.

    Socialism doesn’t mean high taxes or an expensive welfare state. You don’t need socialism to have a portfolio of social-welfare programs. Japan has an extensive social-welfare apparatus, and it is far from socialist. Singapore is super-capitalist, and it offers my favorite kind of welfare: direct money payments to poor people. Even the big-spending Scandinavians have long abandoned the experiments in socialism that wrecked their economies in the postwar decades: In the high-tax European countries that so many of our progressive friends profess to admire, the trend for a generation has been away from state enterprise and central planning and toward privatization, trade, and investment. American progressives say they envy European health care systems they generally know nothing about; their European counterparts sincerely envy an American entrepreneurial ecosystem that they understand all too well but remain unable to replicate. It’s a funny old world.

    Socialism does not mean government-funded education and retirement benefits and health care subsidies—those things are simply welfare, and there are better and worse ways to go about doing such things. Socialism means a centrally planned economy, one that is dominated by state action irrespective of whether it is dominated by formal state enterprises. Food stamps are welfare—socialism can mean state-owned farms and grocery stores, but more often it means a state apparatus that runs the farms and grocery stores as though it owned them, setting prices, negotiating the terms of employment, and determining how business is to be done—a little more of this crop, a little less of that commodity, etc.

    V.I. Lenin described his ideal society as one managed as though it were “one big factory.” The Leninist view, it is worth keeping in mind, was profoundly influenced by some of the big ideas and most influential and prestigious thinkers of late 19th-century and early 20th-century capitalism, especially the mania for “scientific management” associated with Frederick Winslow Taylor.

    And of course KDW gets around to Trump's comment about America being a "department store", characterizing it accurately as "quasi-monarchical Leninism".

    Yes, I'm willing to grant that Kamala would have been worse.

  • "Dad, why did we get off at the "Serfdom" exit?" Jared Dillian also notes the Lenintastic Lunacy at the top: Trump’s 'they can have 5' moment is an attack on capitalism.

    While recently aboard Air Force One, President Donald Trump told reporters that "a young lady—a 10-year-old girl, 9-year-old girl, 15-year-old girl—doesn't need 37 dolls. She could be very happy with two or three or four or five." He doubled down in an interview with NBC's Kristen Welker, saying that Americans "don't need to have 250 pencils. They can have five."

    Trump is referring to the economic hardship that is inevitable due to his tariffs. Toys are a particular focus, many of which come from China and are subject to the highest tariffs. Trump is asking Americans to make sacrifices, and not with the eloquence of John F. Kennedy—the sacrifices we make are simply to satisfy his pride.

    "OK, OK, I'll go to six pencils, kid. You drive a hard bargain."

  • A very slick visualization reminding us that we're doomed. Well, not me. My kids maybe. From Cato: Social Security's Financial Crisis: The Trust Fund Myth Uncovered.

    There’s a big problem with Social Security.

    Most people misunderstand its trust fund, believing it holds real financial assets that ensure future benefits—the equivalent of a piggy bank stuffed with dollar bills.

    Yeah, it ain't that.

    On that topic, Dave Burge is righteously pissed enough to speak truth to power at Twitter:

    It's a thread, and it's no contest: David can out-f CongressCritter Pocan. Pocan apparently got the memo that Democrats should cuss a lot more than they used to.

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