Okay, Machete isn’t Hitchcock or anything; but it’s a fun movie. It also has some interesting libertarian aspects:
- It’s explicitly in favour of open borders.
- It’s implicitly in favour of the right to bear arms.
- It dramatises countereconomic resistance to government (“the Network”).
- It also dramatises the “Baptists and bootleggers” dynamic, as well as the role of government in helping to cartelise the very industries it claims to be trying to protect people from.
- It explicitly endorses the Socratic-Stoic-Ciceronian-Augustinian-Thomistic-Spoonerite principle that an unjust law is not a law.
- By contrast with Cory Doctorow’s (otherwise excellent) Little Brother, whose ending disappointed me, Machete does not end with a reformist exhortation to work within the system; on the contrary, it ends with two of the main characters renouncing forms of state authorisation that they have been given. (I’m being deliberately vague to avoid spoilers.)
Now we just need to convert Robert Rodriguez to agorism and we’ll be all set.