I was watching Tron Legacy the other day and it just struck me the absurdity of the things they're proposing in the Movie. They talk about how the Operating System discussed in the movie was "designed to be free", and how all information should be free.
Obviously, the ridiculousness of this preposition doesn't ring true with the actors, the extras, the writers, the producers or the distributors of this film, otherwise the Movie itself would be free and they would have all worked for free to get it produced and distributed. I wonder how many Caterers, Truck Drivers, Security Guards and others they would have been able to convince to work "for free"?
This is the inherit problem with the "Liberal Progressive" way of thinking is that these lofty rules they want to create would apply to everyone but themselves.
Can you imagine if say, Microsoft decided that it would no longer seek to make a profit on their Operating system? They currently employ 40,000 people JUST in the Seattle Washington area alone. Jobs at Microsoft are some of the highest paying jobs out there with some of the best benefits you can get from practically any company. The economy for Programmers and Software support personnel would be absolutely devastated. Not to mention the hundreds of thousands of small to large businesses that depend on Microsoft for new ways of improving their productivity. This of course, doesn't even begin to take into effect what would happen to the Real Estate Agents, the Car sales and maintainance people, Pizza Delivery guys and every other business in the area that are supported by the fantastic income generated by all those "greedy" folks at Microsoft.
The Socialists used to point to things like the Huffington Post as a Model for a "free exchange" of information, yet as Arianna Huffington has shown, she was more interested in making money off the backs of her free labor supporters.
What these people don't realize is that the ones who will be hurt the most with giveaways of anything free, are the people at the lowest end of the totem pole, who can afford it the least. I find it interesting that for all her talks of "Social Justice" Arianna made no effort to pay out any of the money that she got for the Huffington Post to ANY of the contributors to her Online Magazine, and in fact has built the entire business model on free labor, which she has exploited to her benefit, previously in Ad revenue and now with the AOL deal. The saddest part about this is the fact that Journalists are one of the lowest paid professions in the U.S. and their profession suffers as a whole when exploiters like her promise exposure, while she's making the cold hard cash. But I digress, getting back to Tron...
The Lunacy about the Socialist Engineering that they grafted into the story, is the fact that it actually has absolutely nothing to do with the story. The Power Struggle in the rest of the film has to do with the fight between good and evil and is a story of redemption. How a father did what he could to save his son and atone for his sins. The entire drama shown with the software being given away for free has zero impact on the rest of the story and in my opinion is an unnecessary distraction from the story. Think about it. Beta's and even full versions of Microsoft's Operating system are available for free on the Internet all the time. People don't want it though, because first of all most people use the O/S that came with their computer, and second of all you still need a valid activation code for it to work properly. To top it off, there is no support for a pirated operating system, yet in the story they acted as if, "Oh Well that's it! It's available for free on the Internet, so we can't make a dime on it". I guess in order to watch this film you would have to suspend any reasoning and logic.