This 10-minute video made in 1947 is designed to convince us all that the survival of the federal government (in the form of Congress) is critical to our well being. With its supposed nightmare of state currencies and militias, and a country without a post office, it is hilarious and, well, unpersuasive.
Source link: http://blog.mises.org/4079/nightmare-or-dream/
Nightmare or Dream?
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There’s another interesting aspect to this ghastly little film.
It was released in 1947, during the short-lived Republican Congress of 1946-48. (The first Republican Congress since 1930, and the last until 1950-54.) President Truman was busily railing against “the do-nothing Republican Congress.” The me-too nervous nellies who dominated the GOP were eager to prove themselves innocent of the charge of failing to incessantly legislate (to adapt C.S. Lewis’s famous phrase).
I suspect the Republican’s leadership’s directive to the (rather inept, but doubtless politically well-connected) filmmaker was to show that, Truman’s “charges” notwithstanding, Congress really was doing important stuff:
If not for Congress, there’d be no mail! (Actually, if there was no Congress, there’d be no laws to outlaw direct competition with the federal postal bureaucracy.)
If not for Congress, there’d be no price controls on passenger train fares! (Republicans despise liberty as much as Democrats.)
If not for Congress, there’d be no federal currency! (Luckily the public doesn’t suffer from the sounder currency that would result from competition between the states or — better yet — from getting government out of the money business altogether and its legal tender monopoly in the first place. But at least here, unlike with the post office, it isn’t pretended there’d be no money in the absence of the federal monopoly.)
If not for Congress, we wouldn’t have Socialist Insecurity — er, Social Security!
If not for Congress, we wouldn’t have deductions on the income taxes imposed — by Congress!
If not for Congress, we wouldn’t have this unintentionally hilarious movie seeking to convince how much we owe — to Congress!
This movie did nothing to take the “con” out of Congress for me.
What I cannot believe is that people actually believe that there would be no first class mail without a government monopoly.
That has got to be one of the weirdest films I have ever seen.
Scary.
Perhaps the video would benefit from the “MST3K treatment”. Mystery Science Theater 3000, for those who don’t know, was a weekly show in which a guy named Mike and his two robots would watch a mediocre movie and make fun of it.
In one segment, they watched a WW2 government educational video on traffic safety – produced in the hopes that fewer deaths on the road would mean more able bodies to conscript (the narrator actually said this). As Mike wisely quipped, “if you kill yourself here, you can’t kill them over there!”
*speechless*
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