Bernie Sanders’s advice on fixing the Fed demonstrates the fact that being “anti-Fed” is not enough. One must not just be a critic of the Fed. One must also know what the Fed is doing that is bad, and what the better solution would be. Unfortunately, those of us who think that the Fed has been an engine of trouble in the US economy over the last many decades are sometimes lumped together with socialist critics of Fed policy.
Simon Black reports that Secretary of the Treasury, Jack Lew, just released the government’s audited financial statement for 2015 and it makes Bernie Madoff’s books look like Warren Buffet’s financial statements!
To begin with, the federal government reportedly has $3.2 trillion in assets, but that includes rusty tanks, outdated weapon systems, and the biggest item is $1.2 trillion in student loans (delinquency rates are 11.5 percent and rising)!
Chapter 40: The Tough Cop
The tough cop genre is definitely coming into its own. On TV, the new Kojak series, starring the tough and cynical Telly Savales, has become one of the best shows on television. In the movies, it is particularly significant that two of the great Western heroes have recently shifted to the tough cop role. As urban crime has become the concern of ever greater numbers of Americans, the tough crime fighter—in this case John Wayne and Clint Eastwood—has doffed his horse and ten gallon hat for the Magnum and the police badge.
Chapter 41: Death Wish
Death Wish is a superb movie, the best hero-and-vengeance picture since Dirty Harry. Bronson, an architect whose young family has been destroyed by muggers, drops his namby-pamby left-liberalism, and begins to pack a gun, defending himself brilliantly and uncompromisingly against a series of muggers who infest New York City. Yet he never kills the innocent, or commits excesses.
Chapter 42: Cinema Paradiso
Long-time readers know that I am decidedly not a fan of foreign language movies: not because it is a chore to read subtitles, but because they are invariably horrible examples of aggressively avant-garde, anti-bourgeois cinema. Hating as “commercial” movies that appeal to the average movie-goer, the foreign movie-maker proclaims his superior aesthetic sensibility by scorning interesting plot, tight writing and directing, meaningful dialogue, glamorous photography, or colorful settings.
Chapter 39: Blaxploitation
One of the most important movie phenomena of the last few years has been what the Left-liberal and Establishment critics bitterly deride as “blaxploitation” movies. These are exciting, often delightful films where black private eyes and black gunmen star in black versions of this familiar white style of motion pictures.
Chapter 38: The Godfather, Part II
The Oscars. From the beginning, it was clear that the Oscar race for best picture of 1974 was between two films: Godfather, Part II and Chinatown. As pointed out in these pages (Libertarian Forum, March, 1975), Godfather, a marvelous film, clearly deserved the award. In contrast, the morbid, cynical Chinatown (neatly skewered in Libertarian Review by Barbara Branden) was the darling of the avant-garde intellectuals, serving as it did as an “anti-hero” reversal of the great detective films of the 1940s.
Section VIII: Movie Reviews
Chapter 37: The Godfather
The Godfather is one of the great movies of the last several years, and its enormous popularity is eminently well deserved. In the first place, it is a decidedly Old Culture movie, or “movie-movie”; it is gloriously arrière-garde, and there is not a trace of the avant-garde gimmicks and camera trickery that have helped to ruin so many films in recent years.
