This is an interesting article by Professor Larry Ribstein about art and money and why Hollywood tends to bash business.

This article seeks to provide a plausible explanation of films' bias against capital. It is not business itself that filmmakers do not like, but the capitalists who control it. This may sound like Communism, but it is not the classic view of the struggle between capital and labor. Filmmakers display little concern with the problems of the workingman, and they do not usually blame firms' social irresponsibility on the fact that capital rather than labor is in control. Rather, the filmmakers' main problem with capital being in control seems to be that the fimmakers are not. The "workers" that are oppressed are often creative types, and middle managers who stand in for them, who are being denied adequate opportunity to display their creativity. The ponit of displaying the evil that firms do seems to not to stop it, but to show how much we need the artists and seekers among us to do the finding.

Professor Ribstein conducts one of the more thorough surveys of business-related films that I've seen in a long time. His general perspective is that films normally portray some sort of bias against corporations, or against those in power. His concern is that "through the power of film, the fimmakers' skewed vision moves from fantasy to political reality." The result is "ineffecient legislation" that may hurt business without helping society.

I recognize that there are often situations in which it seems that well-intended legislation fails to acheive the desired result. I read recently how the Fish and Wildlife Service supposedly spends most of its budget on court cases brought by those suing to require that something be placed on the endangered species list, rather than on efforts to determine whether something actually is endangered. And I can recall with no small measure of amusement some of the products liability cases I studied as a law student where the issue was a supposed "defect" in the product or a "failure to warn" consumers of the dangers of some obscure misuse of the product. Those cases clearly led to an overall increase in costs but were often simply the result of a lack of common sense on the part of the victim (or were part of a search for a "deep pocket").