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Soft Tyranny in Albuquerque: The Politics Of Better Call Saul!
Submitted by Paul A. Cantor via The Mises Institute,
In Breaking Bad, Vince Gilligan created one of the best shows in television history. He has followed it with a prequel, Better Call Saul!, which traces how the ethically-challenged lawyer featured in the earlier show — Saul Goodman — developed out of a perennial loser named Jimmy McGill. Breaking Bad fans are overjoyed that Gilligan has struck gold twice, and Better Call Saul! looks to become another television classic. And, although the show is not overtly libertarian, libertarians can learn from it.
With only its first season completed, I’m sure the show has many surprises in store. But one thing is already clear: Gilligan continues to be the champion of the little guy against the establishment, and the poet of the shabbiness of ordinary existence in twenty-first-century America. He captures all the frustration, humiliation, and despair of living in the administered world of the modern state.
Jimmy McGill is a bottom feeder in the swamp of government regulation that now covers the American landscape. As a rookie lawyer, Jimmy becomes a creature of the court system, trying to exploit it even as it exploits him. As the series opens, Jimmy is working as a public defender. In a heavily credentialed society, he is at a huge disadvantage — his law degree is from the University of American Samoa.
Forced to beg for cases from an officious clerk, Jimmy is a parasite on society. If it weren’t for a myriad of government rules and regulations and a multitude of misfits who violate them, Jimmy would be out of work. Scratch beneath the surface of his world, and it’s government regulation all the way down.
In only ten episodes, Jimmy has already run the whole gamut of modern bureaucracy. While struggling with the court system, he is also constantly interacting — and fighting — with a large, high-powered law firm that epitomizes the impersonality and coldness of modern office life. Jimmy has also run up against an uncaring hospital bureaucracy, which tries to commit his brother against his will to psychiatric treatment.
As a named partner in the big law firm, Jimmy’s older brother Chuck might seem to represent the establishment himself. But he has developed a psychosomatic ailment, and thus joins the ranks of all the loners in Better Call Saul! who do not fit into society’s categories and thus incur its bureaucratic wrath.
Another loner who runs afoul of the law in Better Call Saul! is Mike Ehrmantraut, Saul Goodman’s fixer and cleaner in Breaking Bad. When we learn his backstory in episode 6, we discover that he is a basically good man, who has turned to crime only because of his involvement with a corrupt police precinct in Philadelphia.
In the final plot arc of the season, Jimmy develops a specialty in elder law, which takes him into the figurative bowels (and the literal dumpster) of an assisted living facility. In his efforts to help the old folks, Jimmy runs up against a new pack of lawyers, who swamp him with demands for paper work. The mounting cartons of case files Jimmy is continually dragging around symbolize the insane demands for documentation that bureaucracy imposes.
Jimmy is fighting back against these bureaucratic forces, but only by turning his class action lawsuit into a RICO case, which will triple the damage award. Legal eagle Jimmy would have no talons without a federal statute originally intended to combat organized crime, but now routinely applied to white collar crime. In the end, the paperwork demands of the case force Jimmy to turn it over to the large law firm he despises. With all its complex rules, the state makes it impossible for a little guy like Jimmy to do business on his own.
Libertarians tend to concentrate on the classic forms of government intervention: taxation, the monetary system, economic regulations. Better Call Saul! reminds us that government tyranny is actually more insidious and pervasive than might at first appear. When he was working on The X-Files, Gilligan had already explored the modern state’s panoptical regime, as analyzed by French philosopher Michel Foucault — a world rife with institutions, like schools, clinics, and prisons, that are not, strictly speaking, part of the government but nevertheless keep tabs on us and monitor our lives for the government’s purposes.
A theme that unites Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul! (inherited from The X- Files) is that we live in a surveillance state and our government records can mark us for life. Jimmy is haunted by a single trumped-up sex crime charge.
In order to regulate every aspect of our lives, the government cannot go it alone — it works through a web of intermediaries. Many of these institutions purport to take care of us, but in the process they chip away at our freedom. Better Call Saul! brilliantly portrays the interlocking directorate of modern government, quasi-governmental institutions, and all their satellites. The courts, the law firms, the police, the corporations, the hospitals, the assisted living facilities — they all work together to constrain our freedom — and they all operate within the state’s regulatory apparatus.
Jimmy McGill is a contemporary Everyman, crushed by the soft tyranny Alexis de Tocqueville predicted for the United States in his Democracy in America. No wonder Jimmy is already embracing his dark, con-man side, and we can see him morphing into Saul Goodman.
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Right, but if Soros gets busted "managing" Ukraine by prodding the Gov to provide weapons and funding, there is no reprecussions.
Vince Gilligan is a genius that's found his niche at just the right time.
So they put a Ron Paul sticker into Gail's notebook to promote Ron Paul?
Not on Netflix US yet. $1.99 per episode on Amazon -- fuck it, I guess I'll have to do it.
Fight the power
www.watchtv_series.net
use XBMC
And in Afghanistan, "They Hate our Freedoms!"
What is this, ZH and Ebert at the movies.......?
Two thumbs up (one for Gene Siskel).
lol. I was looking for an entry. I think the $usd is going to soften up going into the weekend.
The usd/jpy 4 hour charts look pretty soft. ;-) So does the 5hr usdx chart.
The commodity currencies are oversold, and cable got pounded earlier.(pun intended)
Patience my ass, usd/jpy is going lower. told you so
It isn't that soft.
Ask any pleb who has lost a loved one or their dog to the militarized stormtrooping judge dredd po po thugs.
The families of those who are ripped away and caged without ever victimizing anyone are indeed dealt quite a hard blow as well. No better way to set back an entire generation of a family.
The reality is for a lawyer to have local power, he must contribute to the local judges. The common delusion of sheeple is that they must hire the right lawyer. They fantasize that they can pick the best attorney. The common lawyer will take his client's cash and accomplish nothing.
Knowledge is power. A bribe is less costly than a larger loss. Everything, including justice, has a cost. The words chiseled above every US courthouse are, "Abandon all hope of justice, ye who enter here. Make prior arrangements through your attorney to buy the judge." The honest lawyer would bribe the judge.
It really is a racket. If you can, hire the ex-DA, or the guy who plans to run as the DA.
Lets cheer for that "hero" in the fantasy box and return over and over again, hour upon our, days upon daze.
Meanwhile, at your capitol...
Better get a lawyer son, you better get a real good one! https://youtu.be/RJ0hOKCSuns - Enjoy! ;)
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https://youtu.be/RJ0hOKCSuns
Updated link, tested and working. Google is messin' with me... It is a good ol' hard rock song... Better Get A Lawyer Son by Cruel Sea.. ok, take two... enjoy.
More Hillarious Libertarian Bullshit
Better Call Saul had nothing to with surveillance.
Nothing. I watched every minute. Surveillance never came up.
I was sort of thinking the same thing. I liked the point about the government acting through intermediaries (which is true), but neither TV series delved very deeply into government surveillance. In fact, if anything, it made fun of pathetic attempts at police/government surveillance when it's put up against a criminal element determined to avoid it (works just fine on the sheep, though).
Hell, Walter White's brother in law was a DEA agent in the 'Breaking Bad' series and had no idea Walter was a major drug supplier until the final season.
What I wonder is why one of the Tylers recylces these old shitty troll handles to post here?
I agree No Debt. If anything, I saw lack of "formal" surveillance.
When Saul was "surveilling" the family that embezzled money,($one million) he hired a cop that was wanted for murder to do it.
Granted, they owed "each other" some favors... They did usurp the law.
Saul has a stash of money for you to leave the United States of America. New passport identity comes free of new Obama illegal immigration identity theft.
Liberty is a demand. Tyranny is submission.
Do you submit, or demand?
Real Libertarians don't pay for fucking teeeveee!
Quirky show, but he's a Jooo, no can watch. Stayin pure for ZH. I stick w/ Walking Dead, where all those Jooos show their real nature and the good guys and gals have their minds right ;)
He's not a Jew - he's a goy who ends up changing his name to promote himself. You should watch.
I missed that. Taking on a Jew name is almost worse. (sarc on). I have watched the show, and it is pretty quirky, like much of AMC's original productions. I mentioned Walking Dead, my favorite, but I enjoyed MM, Turn, and Hell on Wheels. Still haven't really watched Breaking Bad. Were it not for AMC, I'd almost never find something to watch anymore.
praise red neck Allah!
?Que?
He may morph into a Q99X2.
It's the double standards that really kill me! I filed a FOIA request to the NSA for all of Hillary Clinton's emails since she took it upon herself to conduct the day to day operations of official U.S. business with a private email address, a private server, then deleted over 30,000 emails without any supervisory review and then wiped her server clean. Wouldn't ya know DoD replied and denied my request stating that the NSA could neither confirm or deny that they collect signals intelligence. What a crock!
saul's got a big audience,cause ,well, dialog rocks..now back to computerized special effects the new motto in hollywood is ..writers we don't need no stinkin writers.
Good show, but I think the author of this piece is reading something into it that isn't there.