Earlier this year I began to notice clumps of adults sleeping on the sidewalks of downtown San Diego and that’s when I discovered that sleeping on the city’s sidewalks had recently been decriminalized.
I always think of this angry crank who was notoriously near-sighted when it came to politics and economics whenever I find myself tempted to say anything substantive about economic theory. It’s too easy, in a way, to say things about a subject one has never studied.
Okay. We get it. Newspapers are defunct. They never even had a viable profit model because they succeeded only by selling classified ads to support their journalism and printing costs, sort of like DeLorean selling coke to keep making his cars.
Of course he was wrong. The idea that markets entirely through their own self-interest can regulate themselves is totally absurd. Their only interest is profit. Furthermore, being wrong here has had catastrophic results.
That’s the news story I want to see, the one that starts with the question of whether or not we’re complicit and what we could be doing about it, not the one that ends with the suggestion and let’s it go at that.
Usually, any film that rotates around a central metaphor (such as oil as a metaphor for blood) fails miserably under its lofty ambition and blunt heavy-handedness.