Persistence of Vision

Via Glenn Reynolds comes the news that James Waterton has given Mine Your Own Business two thumbs up:

This movie has been billed by some as a "right-wing" counterpart to a Michael Moore production, but it comes across as considerably less polemical - and enormously more believable - than the average output from the portly and infamous self-declared son of Flint.

This is a useful film for the liberal cause. I am twenty six, and I have a lot of friends who I would describe as instinctively left-leaning. I have shown the film to some of them. I would like to describe a 'road to Damascus' scene, but there were no Pauls in my audience. Still, several seeds of doubt were planted, and that is a great start - I too was a socialist, but for that seed of doubt planted several years ago. Consequently, I talk to a lot of young people about extending the principle of personal responsibility. I have often thought that the young are natural libertarians - yet, because they are frequently reliant upon the patronage of others for their livelihoods, matters of economics concern them not. Socialism appears affordable and desirable when one pays less than 10% of their income to the tax man. Regardless, I have discovered that it is not so hard to convince a young person of the merits of what is dismissively described as "rugged individualism" by statists - until the environmental question is raised. This is much harder to overcome, because the underlying science is arcane, mastered by few and is thus vulnerable to manipulation. I firmly believe that green politics represents the ultimate bulwark against the adoption of liberal ideals. Therefore I recommend this film. It graphically displays the victims of international green politics - the world's poorest - those that the green movement purports to champion. For this alone, Mine Your Own Business is a useful production.

All great films have roots in older ones. Mine Your Own Business is no exception.