This is a guest post by Paul Mueller, a Program Assistant with the MBM Team. Check out his bio here.
Because movies so often portray businessmen as willing to lie, cheat, steal, and often murder, to make a profit, I was stunned by two 5-10 second scenes from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory supporting free markets.
First, here’s a little background on the story. Charlie is a young boy in a poor family. Nearby is an enormous chocolate factory owned by Willy Wonka. Years earlier, Wonka had shut his factory down because his competitors were constantly spying on him and stealing his candy secrets. But recently the factory has mysteriously reopened and no one is ever seen entering or exiting the factory except trucks shipping the candy.
Then Wonka announces that he is putting five golden tickets in his candy bars and whoever gets a ticket will receive a tour of his factory and a lifetime supply of chocolate. Needless to say, people all over the world begin buying his candy bars like hotcakes. Charlie hopes to find one of the tickets too and, against all odds (a strangely common phenomena in movies), he does.
The first surprising scene (no embedding allowed on this clip, so just a link) comes during the tour of the chocolate factory. Wonka escorts his guests through an edible candy forest where he tells them to enjoy eating whatever they choose. They shouldn’t touch the chocolate river that runs through the forest, however, because they would contaminate it.
Unfortunately, one of the ticket holders, a gluttonous boy named Augustus Gloop, can’t contain himself and starts drinking from the river. In his rush, he falls into the river and is sucked into some pipes directing the liquid chocolate to another part of the factory. When the boy’s worried mother asks Wonka where the pipes lead, he tells her they go to the “strawberry-flavored chocolate-coated fudge” room. In response to her question of whether her son is going to be made into fudge and sold by the pound, Wonka replies:
“No, I wouldn’t allow it. The taste would be terrible. Can you imagine Augustus-flavored chocolate-coated Gloop? Ew. No one would buy it!”
Though one might think there are other, more important reasons why one shouldn’t let a boy be chopped into pieces and made into chocolate bars, this is a good example of how market processes and pure self-interest can lead to the same conclusion.
A second surprisingly market friendly message comes from the portrayal of Charlie’s father and his occupation. When the movie begins, Charlie’s father works at the local toothpaste factory twisting the caps onto tooth paste containers all day long. It is mind-numbing, dull, and low-paying work. As the movie progresses, the factory replaces him with a machine. So now instead of a small income, Charlie’s family has none. Modernization and automation have struck again. This is usually where socialists, statists, and Hollywood actors leave the story. But in this movie, there is a later scene where Charlie’s father is back where he used to work; only this time he is a technician fixing the machine. While having a more interesting job, it also shows him working less time than he used to fixing and getting paid a lot more for it. Even though technological innovation and creative destruction lead to dislocation for some workers for a time, they ultimately bring great rewards of productivity and higher standards of living.
Have you come across any movies that can help illistrate creative destruction?
Thanks to Paul for submitting this post. If you'd like to submit a potential post, email Ann.zerkle (at) cgkfoundation. org.
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