The release of No Time to Die marks the end of Daniel Craig’s run as James Bond. Since embarking on this role in 2006 for Casino Royale, critics have hailed his movie’s more realistic take on Ian Fleming’s famous spy.1 And with blonde hair and a head the size and shape of a medicine ball and matching visage, Craig was certainly a visual departure from his predecessors. It is only fitting then that his finale comes in a film where the reality of our rulers’ failed planning and violent intervention that begets more violent intervention are on full display.
The plot of No Time to Die, such as it is in a movie where an explanation of key characters’ motivations or funding sources did not make the final cut, involves Bond trying to prevent the usage of Project Heracles which can target and kill specific people based on their DNA. The rub is that he is attempting to destroy a weapon that M sanctioned the development of only to have it stolen from MI6 by SPECTRE who in turn have it purloined from them by the film’s uber-villain, Lyutsifer Safin. When Bond confronts his boss about such an error in judgment, M resorts to pleas of patriotism and protecting the masses to rationalize greenlighting Project Heracles, arguments that fail to impress his best state-hired assassin.
It is in this scene that the film presents the audience with some semblance of reality. We have the leader of a tax-funded organization lacking the foresight to see that creating something as powerful and dangerous as Project Heracles might not go as well as planned. Bond’s incredulity is almost Hayekian in that it brings into focus the inability of state functionaries, no matter how well informed, to create plans that achieve the ends they desire. Of course the dictates of plot require that Bond’s misgivings do not change him and he sets out to violently undo his employer’s mistake, actions in keeping with Mises’s statement that, ‘If the government will not set things right again by desisting from its interference…then it must follow up the first (intervention) with others’.2
While Hayek was writing about a different form of central planning and Mises’s above quote concerns price controls, their insights apply to more violent forms of state intervention. Perhaps it is telling that both men served as officers in the Austro-Hungarian army during the First World War,3 an event that is almost a case study in how those that rule over us, those with the most information, can get it very wrong. For instance, some in July 1914, including the Kaiser and Tsar, had a premonition of the disaster their actions would bring and yet they plunged into the abyss anyway. These choices were all the more unconscionable for the statesmen of Russia, who, only nine years previous, had experienced a disastrous military defeat followed by revolution. In 1917, the second coming of each was far worse.
This example of Russia or the Americans’ hurried exit from Afghanistan calling to mind an ignominious flight from Saigon lend themselves to the cliché that history repeats itself. Or, as Marx referred to Napoleon and his less illustrious nephew, ‘world-historic facts and personages appear…twice…the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce’.4 But history repeats itself only insofar as people make similar mistakes because they are prone to age-old vices like a lust for power, myopia, or the vanity that they can control things they most certainly cannot. At the individual level, the problems these shortcomings create remain localized. When present in state functionaries, those that would perfect the world with their intentions, they lead to theft, the upending of the social order, gulags and killing fields; all historical events brought about by an iniquity and ineptness that Hayek and Mises witnessed firsthand.
In the penultimate scene of No Time to Die, the state-sponsored murderers from MI6 drink expensive liquor in a lavish office, all of it funded by the taxpayers their acts have nearly destroyed. Then they depart to carry on their interventions elsewhere in the world, seemingly having learned nothing and reminding the viewer of the CIA agents at the end of the Coen brothers’ superior film, Burn After Reading. ‘I guess we learned not to do it again’, one of the agents says, although he admits to having no clue what they did the first time around. Such comments are farcical enough on the silver screen. In real life, they are only too tragic.
- 1Elvy, Craig, (2021). James Bond: Every Way Daniel Craig’s Era Changed 007, James Bond: Every Way Daniel Craig's Era Changed 007 (screenrant.com).
- 2Mises, Ludwig von, (1962). Liberalism: A Socio-Economic Exposition, p. 78.
- 3McCaffrey, Matthew, (2018). ‘The First World War Deeply Affected a Generation of Austrian Economists’, The First World War Deeply Affected a Generation of Austrian Economists | Mises Wire.
- 4Marx, Karl, (1852). ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’, 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Karl Marx 1852 (marxists.org).
