Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome

[Friday]

libertarian premise screwed up by socialist writers: discuss! 

I love Mad Max movies, and Beyond Thunderdome is the most ambitious of the three.  To review, or for those who have never seen a Mad Max movie (um, Jane?  ), all three movies take place in Australia after a nuclear holocaust which has caused a complete breakdown of modern civilization.  Gas has become an incredibly precious commodity, because no more of it is being manufactured.  There's no law and order.  Vicious gangs go around raping and pillaging.  The protagonist, Max, is a former cop who has lost all his faith in humanity after his wife and baby are killed by goons.  It's a brutal, dog-eat-dog world, and he is only looking out for #1. 

At the beginning of Beyond Thunderdome, after getting mugged in the Outback and losing everything he owns, he comes across an oasis of civilization in an uncivilized world.  It's a place called Bartertown, where the laws are minimal and easy to understand.  A deal's a deal; if you break it, you suffer painful consequences.  Violence is frowned upon; if you fail to work out your differences with someone in a peaceful manner, the two of you are thrown into a public arena and duke it out until only one of you remains.  There's no need for currency; people barter what they have or what they can do for what they want.  The town even has electricity, generated by its own methane production facility.  It has commerce. It even has a penal system; if you get caught stealing, you get sent to the methane factory to shovel pig poop.

Max strikes a bargain with Auntie Entity, the founder and mayor/warlord/not sure what the appropriate word is of Bartertown:  he agrees to kill a man in exchange for recovery of his stolen property.  The man that Auntie Entity wants killed is essentially a thug;  he serves as the muscle for the engineering genius who makes Bartertown's electricity possible.  He has, presumably, killed multiple times already.

Now here's where I start having a problem with the movie.  Max fights the thug, and at the moment of truth discovers that the guy is retarded and doesn't have the heart to finish him off.  To me, this is like playing the insanity card.  Who freakin' CARES if the guy is retarded? He has most definitely killed multiple times and is a menace to society!  Max welches on the agreement he made with Auntie, and publicly embarasses her in front of the whole town by letting everyone know that she was the one who hired him to kill the thug.  She then loses her temper, and things go downhill for Max from there. 

I'm curious as to how other libertarians interpret this story.  Was it wrong for Auntie to want to have Blaster killed in order to maintain the workings of Bartertown? In my opinion, the little man was getting too big for his tiny britches, acting like a petulant union boss and holding the whole town at ransom until he got his way.  Then again, assassination isn't very nice.  Hmmmmmmmmm.

[Dreepa]

"Break a deal, Spin the Wheel"

[Russell Kanning]

gotta go with you on this one Friday .... stupid killers are still killers.

[Friday]

"Break a deal, Spin the Wheel"

"Break a deal, FACE the Wheel" 

"Two men enter, one man leaves" - postapocalyptic cure for recidivism