Marx vs. Ayn Rand: The Coen Brothers

The popular television series "Fargo", heavily derived from the Coen brothers' film of the same name but quite different and in many ways much better, has received critical acclaim. On the surface, it's a story of good, represented by the local Minnesota police, versus evil, in the form of an out-of-town assassin named Malvo portrayed brilliantly by Billy Bob Thornton.

Spoiler alert: good prevails. But there's a possible subtext to the series, another layer of meaning. Malvo, it seems to me, represents a libertarian hero.

The good people of Minnesota are portrayed as being as blah and uncreative as can possibly be imagined. They are television-addicted couch potatoes who live in a rigid social and political structure weighed down with suffocating bureaucracy and rules, especially the police, who enforce the rules and are paid from tax money. They are government itself. From a libertarian point of view, they epitomize the lazy, unproductive parasites sucking the life blood from Ayn Rand's precious "makers".

Malvo, on the other hand, is a libertarian hero. He is creative and energetic and the epitome of free enterprise. His "business" happens to be murder, but he only murders lesser humans who are unproductive and have no creative energy, and so have no right to live, and he does it with spirit and style. Far from being a celebration of good conquers evil, the series can be seen as a libertarian tragedy. It's the triumph of the weak over the strong, the ultimate libertarian nightmare in which the meek inherit the earth.

Of course, modern libertarians mostly stop short of approving assassination for hire as an acceptable enterprise, even if the targets are lazy and useless hangers-on that live off other people's creative energy. So the series can be seen as taking libertarianism to its logical extreme, then asking the question that Malvo asks when confronted in a Las Vegas elevator by his acolyte Lester Nygaard, "Do you want this, Lester? Do you want this?".

If you haven't seen the series, I recommend it. It has a 98% "fresh" rating on rottentomatoes.com. You can find it on Amazon Instant Video and probably other on-demand sites as well. It's extremely well done and great entertainment. Besides that, it seems to have something to say that's worth considering.