The Ultimate South Park and Philosophy (30 page)

This chart basically encapsulates the economic illiteracy of the American public. They can see no connection between the activities business people undertake and the profits they make. What entrepreneurs actually contribute to the economy is a big question mark to them.
¹³
The fact that entrepreneurs are rewarded for taking risks, for correctly anticipating consumer demands, and for efficiently financing, organizing, and managing production is lost on most people. They would rather complain about the obscene profits of corporations and condemn their power in the marketplace.

The “invisible hand” passage of Smith’s
Wealth of Nations
reads like a gloss on the “Gnomes” episode of
South Park
:

As every individual, therefore, endeavours as much as he can both to employ his capital in the support of domestick industry, and so to direct that industry that its produce may be of the greatest value; every individual necessarily labours to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can. He genuinely, indeed, neither intends to promote the publick interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. By preferring the support of domestick to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security, and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was no part of it. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectively than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the publick good.
¹⁴

“Gnomes” exemplifies this idea of the “invisible hand.” The economy does not need to be guided by the very visible and heavy hand of government regulation for the public interest to be served. Without any central planning, the free market produces a prosperous economic order. The free interaction of producers and consumers and the constant interplay of supply and demand work so that people ­generally have access to the goods they want. Like Adam Smith, Parker and Stone are deeply suspicious of people who speak about the public good and condemn the private pursuit of profit. As we see in the case of Mr. Tweek, such people are usually hypocrites, pursuing their self-interest under the cover of championing the public interest. And the much-maligned gnomes of the world, the corporations, while openly pursuing their own profit, end up serving the public interest by providing the goods and services people really want.

Having had the audacity to defend Starbucks, in its eighth season
South Park
went on to rally to the cause of Wal-Mart—under an even more thinly disguised name in an episode called “Something ­Wall Mart This Way Comes.” This episode is brilliantly cast in the mold of a cheesy horror movie, as the sinister power of a Wal-Mart-like superstore takes over the town of South Park amid lengthening shadows, darkening clouds, and ominous flashes of lightning. The Wall Mart exerts “some mystical evil force” over the townspeople. Try as they may, they cannot resist its bargain prices. Just as in “Gnomes,” a local merchant starts complaining about his inability to compete with a national retail chain. In mock sympathy, Cartman plays syrupy violin music to accompany this lament. When Kyle indignantly smashes the violin, Cartman simply replies: “I can go get another one at Wall Mart—it was only five bucks.”

Widespread public opposition to the Wall Mart develops in the town and efforts are made to boycott the store, ban it, and even burn it down (the latter to the uplifting strain of “Kumbaya”). But like any good monster, the evil Wall Mart keeps springing back to life and the townspeople are irresistibly drawn to its well-stocked aisles at all hours (“Where else was I going to get a napkin dispenser at 9:30 at night?”). All these horror movie clichés are a way of making fun of how Wal-Mart is demonized by intellectuals in our society. They present the national chain as some kind of external power, independent of human beings, which somehow manages to impose itself upon them against their will—a corporate monster. At times the townspeople talk as if they simply have no choice in going to the superstore, but at other times they reveal what really attracts them—lower prices that allow them to stretch their incomes and enjoy more of the good things in life. To be even-handed, the episode does stress at several points the absurdities of buying in bulk just to get a bargain—for example, ending up with enough Ramen noodles “to last a thousand winters.”

In the grand horror movie tradition, the boys finally set out to find the heart of the Wall Mart and destroy it. Meanwhile, Stan’s father, Randy, has gone to work for the Wall Mart for the sake of the 10 percent employee discount, but he nevertheless tries to help the boys reach their objective. But as they get closer, Randy notes with increasing horror: “The Wall Mart is lowering its prices to try to stop us,” and in the end he deserts the children when he sees a screwdriver set marked down beyond his wildest dreams. He cries out: “This bargain is too great for me,” as he rushes off to a cash register to make a purchase. When the boys at last reach the heart of the Wall Mart, it turns out to be a mirror in which they see themselves. In one of the show’s typical didactic moments, the spirit of the superstore tells the children: “That is the heart of Wall Mart—you, the consumer. I take many forms—Wall Mart, K-Mart, Target—but I am one single entity—desire.” Once again,
South Park
proclaims the sovereignty of the consumer in a market economy. If people keep flocking to a superstore, it must be doing something right, and satisfying their desires. Randy tells the townspeople: “The Wall Mart is us. If we like our small-town charm more than the big corporate bullies, we all have to be willing to pay a little bit more.” This is the free market solution to the superstore problem—no government need intervene. The townspeople accordingly march off to a local store named Jim’s Drugs and start patronizing it. The store is so successful, it starts growing, and eventually mutates into—you guessed it—a superstore just like Wal-Mart.
South Park
has no problem with big businesses when they get big by pleasing their customers.

Parker and Stone acknowledge that they themselves work for a large corporation, the cable channel Comedy Central, which is owned by a media giant, Viacom. In the
Reason
interview, Stone says: “People ask, ‘So how is it working for a big multinational conglomeration?’ I’m like, ‘It’s pretty good, you know? We can say whatever we want. It’s not bad. I mean, there are worse things.’”
¹⁵
Anti-corporate intellectuals would dispute that claim, and point to several occasions when Comedy Central pulled
South Park
episodes off the air in response to various pressure groups, including Viacom itself.
¹⁶
But despite such occasional interference, the fact is that it was Comedy Central that financed the production of
South Park
from the beginning and thus made it possible in the first place. Over the years, the corporation has given Parker and Stone unprecedented creative freedom in shaping a show for television—and not because the corporate executives are partisans of free speech and trenchant satire but because the show has developed a market niche and been profitable.
South Park
doesn’t simply defend the free market in its episodes—it is itself living proof of how markets work to create something of artistic value and, in the process, benefit producers and consumers alike.
¹⁷

1
.
Symposium
, 221E–222A. Quoted in the translation of W.R.M. Lamb,
Plato: Lysis, Symposium, Gorgias
, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1925), 239.

2
.
The Clouds
, lines 392–394. Quoted in the translation of William Arrowsmith,
The Clouds
(New York: New American Library, 1962), 45.

3
. Mises’ most famous book is
Human Action: A Treatise on Economics
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1949) and Hayek’s is
The Road to Serfdom
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944).

4
. Rothbard articulates his libertarian philosophy most fully in
The Ethics of Liberty
(New York: New York University Press, 2002) and
For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto
(New York: Macmillan, 1978). Perhaps the clearest introduction to the economic principles underlying libertarianism is Henry Hazlitt,
Economics in One Lesson
(San Francisco: Laissez-Faire Books, 1996).

5
. As quoted in Brian C. Anderson,
South Park Conservatives: The Revolt against Liberal Media Bias
(Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2005), 178.

6
. Nick Gillespie and Jesse Walker, “
South Park
Libertarians: Trey Parker and Matt Stone on Liberals, Conservatives, Censorship, and Religion,”
Reason
, 38:7 (2006): 66.

7
. For an analysis of why such groups turn against capitalism, see Ludwig von Mises,
The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality
(Princeton, NJ: D. Van Nostrand, 1956), especially pp. 30–33 for the turn against capitalism in Hollywood.

8
. A perfect example of Hollywood’s negative portrayal of businessmen is the cruel banker Mr. Potter in the classic
It’s A Wonderful Life
(dir. Frank Capra, 1946). For a comprehensive survey of the portrayal of businessmen in American popular culture, see the chapter “The culture industry’s representation of business” in Don Lavoie and Emily Chamlee-Wright,
Culture and Enterprise: The Development, Representation and Morality of Business
(London: Routledge, 2000), 80–103. Here are some representative figures from media studies: “Of all the antagonists studied in over 30 years of programming, businessmen were twice as likely to play the role of antagonist than any other identifiable occupation. Business characters are nearly three times as likely to be criminals, relative to other occupations on television. They represent 12 percent of all characters in identifiable occupations, but account for 32 percent of crimes. Forty-four percent of all vice crimes such as prostitution and drug trafficking committed on television, and 40 percent of TV murders, are perpetrated by business ­people” (84).

9
. Mises,
Anti-Capitalistic Mentality
, 2.

10
. George Bernard Shaw offers this interpretation of Alberich; see his
The Perfect Wagnerite
(1898) in George Bernard Shaw,
Major Critical Essays
(Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1986), 198, 205.

11
. For the way H.G. Wells uses invisibility as a symbol of capitalism, see my essay “
The Invisible Man
and the Invisible Hand: H.G. Wells’s Critique of Capitalism,” in
Literature and the Economics of Liberty: Spontaneous Order in Culture
, ed. Paul A. Cantor and Stephen Cox (Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2009), 293–305.

12
. Friedrich Hayek,
The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 90, 91, 93.

13
. Several e-mail responses to an earlier version of this chapter argued that the gnomes’ diagram makes fun of the sketchy business plans that flooded the initial public offering (IPO) market in the heyday of the
dot.com
boom in the 1990s. Having helped write a few such documents myself, I know what these correspondents are referring to, but I still think that my interpretation of this scene fits the context better. If the gnomes’ business plan is simply satirizing dot.com IPOs, then it has no relation to the rest of the episode.

14
. Adam Smith,
An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
, 2 vols. (1776; rpt. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Classics, 1981), vol. 1, 456.

15
. Gillespie and Walker, “
South Park
Libertarians,” 63.

16
. The episodes in question were pulled only from the repeat rotation; they were allowed to air originally and they are now once again available in the DVD sets of the series.

17
. A version of this chapter was published under the title “Cartman Shrugged:
South Park
and Libertarianism” in
Liberty
21:9 (2007): 23–30. For a fuller version of my analysis of
South Park
—including comparisons to works by Rabelais and Mark Twain, as well as a discussion of the controversy surrounding the show’s effort to present an image of Muhammad in one episode—see chapter 6 of my book
The Invisible Hand in Popular Culture: Liberty vs. Authority in American Film and TV
(Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2012).

Kevin S. Decker

Sometimes when I get wrapped up in a television show, I ask the question, “Would I want to live where this show takes place?” The future of the
Star Trek
universe and
Community
’s Greendale Com­munity College are pretty high up the list of desirable destinations. However, the eponymous small town of South Park is probably the last place I’d want to live. It goes without saying that, in the South Park basin in Colorado, the normal rules of logic, social relations, physics, and of course, good taste, don’t apply. More importantly, the people of South Park don’t have any of the traits needed to hold a society together, much less create institutions and practices that would allow its citizens to flourish. South Parkers are venial, self-centered, stupid, incompetent, enamored of scatological humor, and, like some Tourette’s patients, seemingly unable to prevent themselves from speaking obscenely.