If You Want to Create Something Great...

... Create to Earn Money.

I have a theory. Maybe it's crazy, but I've been thinking about it for a while, and I might as well share it here:

I think a creative industry eventually dies when its members abandon the profit motive.

Just to be clear, I don't think you should create only for profit. I think you should also love what you do -- and you should try to have something worthwhile to say about the world and the human condition.

But I keep thinking about the covers of old comic books I love - covers that often announce point-blank Stan Lee's desire to sell "mags" - and I wonder.

One thing I notice about the creators who poo-poo the idea that publishing is a business like other businesses - the creators who bristle at the notion that they're really hot dog vendors - is that they're usually extremely focused on their own belly buttons. What's more, they act like writing isn't a means of communicating with many different types of people -- preferring instead to "speak" with narrow, rarefied audiences of like-minded yes-men. Despite all their talk of "empathy" and "compassion," they never actually bother to understand what the average consumer wants -- and consequently, their art comes across as parochial and time-bound.

Honestly, the works I prefer are generally works that were created because, in part, somebody wanted to earn some dough. The reason for this is, I think, pretty simple: you can't sell many books if you don't think of people other than yourself. Sorry, cupcakes, but unless you've led a truly amazing and unique life, nobody wants to read about you. They want to read about fictional people who face tribulations beyond the prosaic. They want to be transported. And, I think, they also want to read stories with verisimilitude -- something you can't achieve if you don't spend time engaged with the world beyond your own mirror.

I don't mean to suggest that you can't make money with trash. You obviously can. But in my experience, you're more likely to find a gem among those books created to pay the bills than among those created by folks who think the "starving artist" identity is some high ideal.

Just my $.02.

So a Hollywood Actor Said Something Stupid

In other news, water is wet, bears crap in the woods, and the pope is Catholic.

Actors, by and large, have little education in history or economics. Most of them also happen to live in an area where the class differences are extremely stark; thus, if they have any compassion whatsoever, they're going to feel guilty about making millions screaming at green screens while other Californians are sleeping in their cars. Seriously: it's pretty much a given.

What does this mean? Well, it means I shrugged and got on with my life when Mark Ruffalo put his ignorant foot in his mouth on Twitter. Actor follows the pack and says idiot leftist thing? Ooh, big story.

Obviously, Ruffalo is wrong. Capitalism isn't killing us. Capitalism - or, to use a term that wasn't coined by our enemies, voluntary human cooperation - is what's going to save our butts. Hell, it's saving lives already. Extreme poverty, infant mortality, starvation - the trends for all of those are extraordinarily positive, and they correlate with a global increase in economic liberty. Where there's no liberty, on the other hand, we see environmental degradation and human immiseration.

Want a big Scandinavian-style welfare state? As any Scandinavian will tell you, it's the market economy that enables that sort of government spending. Want to save the environment? (I know I do!) Well, you need wealth and innovation to do that -- and to have wealth and innovation, you need freedom.

The woes Ruffalo is probably seeing around Hollywood are not the result of capitalism. On the contrary, they are the result of state interference. Ordinary people can't find affordable places to live in California because state and municipal governments have rendered it almost impossible to build anything new. Ordinary people find it difficult to make a decent living in part because, once again, government has imposed unnecessary licensing laws and minimum wages that artificially raise the bar for entry.

So Mr. Ruffalo - bruh - I think I know where you're coming from, but the facts are just not on your side. Please look into what's going on in Venezuela as we speak. Please look into the history of China or the Soviet Union. And while you're at it, please read a little more on the laws of supply and demand. Perhaps then you can opine on our current problems without accidentally making things worse.

Yes, I know: this political post is out of sequence. I figured I needed to jump on this story right away, so I've pushed the weekly Iron Man post to Friday and the weekly "geeky" post to Sunday.

Guest Post: The Super Bowl and the Wonders of Wealth Creation, by Matthew S.

My brother wrote this up on Facebook the other day, and I think it's good enough to re-post.

People who pass along memes tallying the money spent on Super Bowl ads and bemoaning that that money wasn't used to feed the poor or some other emotional cause do not understand how wealth is created. The Super Bowl is portrayed, by the left, as a terrible waste of resources - a giant vacuum sucking money from the poor and pouring it into the rich. This is utterly false. The Super Bowl, and all other manner of 'decadent' entertainment, creates enormous wealth out of NOTHING. The left believes there is a finite supply of treasure and it is their job to spread it around evenly. Thank God that they are wrong about this, or we would all be living in mud huts and eating bugs.

In 1900, the vast majority of Americans were barely surviving on a meager supply of food and a limited number of actual possessions. If you owned shoes, you were doing better than 42% of your fellow citizens. THINK ABOUT THAT. Really stop and think. Because the miracle that is the engine of economic progress driving our economy has made it so that almost every homeless man owns a pair of shoes today and most Americans own 5 or 6 pairs, including specialty items like boots for the snow, running shoes for the workout, work shoes that are fancier, flip flops for the beach, etc. Or...to put it another way, even after accounting for inflation, the average person in 1900 was grindingly poor compared to the average person today.

There are six ways to create wealth out of nothing:

1. Invent something new that people want (you may think, they have to buy it from their limited resources!, but no...creating demand for something causes you to be able to create jobs to make the something...if enough people are doing this, there is more wealth for all).
2. Teach people how to properly use/maintain/repair something or do that work yourself (every time we can keep an object useful and extend its life, we are creating value).
3. Teach people the skills they need to create wealth some other way.
4. Maintain/track/supply data that empowers the innovators.
5. Make something (manufacturing).
6. Serve people (the service, entertainment, and retail industries) - this one may be less obvious, but humans need cultural experiences...they need outlets for their natural aggressions, creative desires, and to soothe them when they are in need of an escape...those are all hardwired into our genetic code. Art, sport, culture, and story-telling being necessary for the happiness and prosperity of the people, their presence creates wealth (not to mention all of the jobs those parts of our society create and the assistance that advertising gives to innovators and manufacturers and food service etc).

And all of those things make all of us richer, so that more of us have extra wealth to give to charity, to help our fellow men, and to squander on inefficient leftist government policies that try to re-distribute the imaginary static pool of wealth that would never have existed if not for the rise of industrial capitalism.

Chaser: Capitalism Has Made Human Life Fantastically Better