Guest Post: Old Man Potter Lived a Wonderful Life

by Tom Mullen

December is upon us and that means plentiful opportunities to watch the enduring classic, It’s a Wonderful Life. Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of viewers completely misinterpret Frank Capra’s dystopian nightmare as a heartwarming Christmas tale.

The emotional appeal of angels getting their wings is undeniable. Crying out for correction, however, are the vicious slanders regarding the film’s real hero, Henry Potter.

We first hear of Potter from George Bailey’s father, Peter Bailey, who badmouths Potter with the usual falsehoods about businessmen. But during Bailey’s envious rant, we learn something important: Henry Potter is a board member of the building and loan. We later learn Potter is, in fact, a stockholder.

That puts a somewhat different light on his subsequent motion to liquidate the business upon Peter Bailey’s death. Yes, we hear George Bailey repeating the familiar socialist tropes his father did: that Potter only wants to close the building and loan because he “can’t get his hands on it” and considers the little people cattle, etc. 

But Potter responds with some rather inconvenient facts: the building and loan has been making bad business decisions, providing what we’d now call subprime loans to people who can’t pay them back.


Potter the Stockholder
The Baileys squander their investors’ money on a do-gooder, subprime loan scheme to make everyone a homeowner.

We don’t know how Potter became a stockholder, but the Bailey Building and Loan does not appear to be a publicly traded company. The most likely explanation is Peter Bailey asked Potter for capital, just as George Bailey does later in the film, in between rounds of disparaging Potter as a greedy capitalist. That would be perfectly consistent with today’s “progressives,” who rail against capitalists out of one side of their mouths while sucking up to them for money out of the other.

But regardless of how Potter became a stockholder, Peter Bailey has a fiduciary duty to him to run the business for maximum profit, providing Potter and the other stockholders a return on their investments, something George Bailey confirms they never intended to do. Instead, the Baileys squander their investors’ money on a do-gooder, subprime loan scheme to make everyone a homeowner. It worked out in fictional Bedford Falls about as well as it did in early 2000s America.

Meanwhile, the Baileys constantly slander Potter’s rental houses as “overpriced slums.” These are the same Baileys whose housing opportunities are more expensive than Potter’s.


But People Like Potter’s Houses
Their accusations constantly beg the question: If Potter’s houses are so bad, why do so many people choose to live in them? It’s constantly implied Potter’s customers have no other choice, but what exactly does that mean? Why has no one else, including any of the businessmen on the board of the Bailey Building and Loan, developed rental properties that are higher in quality, lower in price, or both?

The inescapable truth is Potter is wealthy because he provides a product that most satisfies his customers’ preferences for quality and price. If there were an opportunity to provide a higher quality product at a lower price than Potter was charging, a competitor would do so and take market share away from Potter, until Potter either raised his quality, lowered his price, or both.

The Baileys burn with resentment that so many residents of Bedford Falls prudently choose to live in Potter’s less expensive housing than buy a house they can’t afford, financed by the Baileys’ Ponzi scheme. Thus, even after shirking their fiduciary duty to run the business properly, the Baileys spend decades assaulting Potter’s character in a transparent attempt to lure away his customers.


Potter the Rescuer
When the Depression hits and the Bailey Building and Loan is exposed for the fractional reserve fraud it is, Potter offers to come to the rescue with a generous offer to buy out its customers. It is noteworthy there is a run on the Bailey Building and Loan and the local bank, but Potter is financially secure enough to save them both, proving once again he is the only honorable businessman in the film.

But we must give the devil his due. George Bailey, the ultimate huckster, saves the building and loan without Potter’s help, convincing the yokel mob making a run on his business to keep their money tied up in his fundamentally insolvent confidence game.

That brings us to the one regrettable act Potter is guilty of, which is concealing the $8,000.00 the incompetent Billy Bailey inadvertently handed him while attempting to make a deposit. It’s true this was an underhanded act, although not unprovoked.

We don’t know how much Potter had invested in the Building and Loan to become a stockholder, but suspect it was a lot more than $8,000. One could make the case he was merely getting back some of the money the Baileys had previously defrauded him of, but there are courts for such matters and Potter should have sought their help if he had a case.


Smearing Potter
Nevertheless, two generations of Baileys had led a decades-long assault on Potter’s good name, resulting in most townspeople disliking him, even though he has quite literally saved their lives on numerous occasions. Without him, a large portion of Bedford Falls would be unemployed, have nowhere to live, or both. It is not an exaggeration to say that without Henry Potter, Bedford Falls would cease to exist. Yet, thanks to the Baileys, he is the most hated man in town.

Compare Potter’s vindictive reaction when George Bailey crawls to him for help after the $8,000.00 is lost to Potter’s reaction at the board meeting at the beginning of the movie. At the board meeting, Potter dismisses George’s unhinged attack upon him and redirects the discussion to the subject of the meeting: what is best for Bedford Falls. By the latter confrontation, Potter tries to have George arrested for embezzling.

Potter’s dastardly act is totally out of character with the Potter of the earlier scene or any other event we know of in Potter’s life. As far as we know, he has always been a hard-nosed, unsentimental businessman, but has never committed a crime or held a grudge, as he does now. Everything we know about Potter up to this point tells us his vindictive attempt to have George Bailey prosecuted is precisely the kind of emotional decision-making Potter has avoided for most of his life. That is why he is so wealthy at the beginning of the film.


Potter’s Breaking Point
Everyone has a breaking point. Potter had evidently reached his. Had he been prosecuted for keeping the $8,000.00, which may have been tricky from a legal standpoint, given that Billy Bailey had handed the money to him, he could easily have plead temporary insanity caused by years of psychological warfare waged against him by the Baileys.

We’ll never know, because before Potter has any opportunity to allow his passion to cool and clear up the misunderstanding, George Bailey sets off on his suicide melodrama, followed by a long, self-aggrandizing hallucination about angels and how Bedford Falls would be worse without him. By the time he concludes his childish escape from reality, the same yokels he previously conned during the Depression are now bailing him out once again, foreshadowing so many future bailouts of dishonest financiers whose assets should have been turned over to better management in bankruptcy court.


The Triumph of Evil
In one of the darkest moments of the film, George Bailey’s Christmas tree is jostled and one of the bells adorning it rings. George Bailey, now confident he and his fraudulent real estate scheme are safe, suggests the bell signifies an angel has earned his wings, as if his dishonest business dealings and ruthless defamation of legitimate competitors had divine sanction.

Nothing more is heard of Henry Potter, the man without whom Bedford Falls would not exist. He is left friendless and without the one thing he could cling to before George Bailey, the Devil incarnate, wrested it from his grasp: his honor. As the credits roll, evil has triumphed. The economic fallacies inherent in Baileyism become accepted truth, resulting in disaster after disaster, including the most recent in 2008.



Tom Mullen is the author of Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness? and A Return to Common  Sense: Reawakening Liberty in the Inhabitants of America. For more information and more of Tom's writing, visit www.tommullen.net.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

Guest Post: Price Gougers Actually Help Solve the Problem of Scarcity

by Tom Mullen

Whenever there is a natural disaster, we see two things: the best in human generosity, courage and resilience and the worst in economic ignorance.

The former includes individuals rescuing stranded neighbors, volunteers lining up to join charity relief efforts, and corporations marshaling their vast resources to pour needed items such as food, bottled water and clothing into devastated areas. The latter includes “economists” repeating the age old broken window fallacy and politicians denouncing and threatening so-called “price gougers.”

Emotions run high during disasters, which is a double-edged sword. The outpouring of sympathy for the victims leads to extraordinary efforts in assistance. But it also leads to irrational resentment of those whose actions are often vital to human survival, but whose motives are judged inferior. These are, of course, the aforementioned price gougers.

One of the weaknesses in rational responses to the accusation of price gouging is just that: they appeal to reason when the accusation is born of emotion. And that disconnect is an irrevocable one until the accuser can be persuaded to look at the situation reasonably. But once so persuaded, the accuser often voices the understandable objection that economic arguments rooted in supply and demand charts and theory are too removed from what the accuser considers “the real world.”

Real World Behavior
Here, then, is a “real world” scenario in which the actors respond to incentives just as anyone in similar situations have countless times in the past:

There is a hurricane and flooding. Drinkable water is in short supply. A man has $100. He needs a case of water to get his family of three through the week. He walks into the store, where water is $25/case. There are 4 cases left on the shelf. He needs one, but can afford 4 and he doesn’t know how long the emergency will last. So, he buys all 4 cases.

Immediately afterwards, a family of five walks into the store with $100. There is no water to buy at any price. This family is now in desperate straits and must look elsewhere to procure what they need to survive.

Can anyone dispute the actors in this little parable have acted rationally and precisely as they would in the real world? No. Neither have any acted in a malicious or overly selfish manner. All have made the best choices among the alternatives presented them.
Now, change the price of a case of water in the above scenario to $100/case. What would be different? Of course, the man with a family of three would now only be able to buy one case of water, giving him what his family needs, but not necessarily as much insurance against future uncertainty as he would like. He gives up a little, but the family of five whose survival was in grave danger in the $25/case scenario is now able to purchase at least one case of water.

In the latter scenario, both families have enough to survive and a strong incentive to conserve water, thereby reducing demand and lowering its price, all other things being equal.

The so-called “price gougers” may have acted in their own interests, but they have not only benefited society economically, they have saved the lives of the family of five. Thus, Adam Smith’s 241-year-old “invisible hand” is confirmed by the real world yet again.

Incentivizing Other Entrepreneurs
But there are still those who claim that, while the price gougers have acted rationally and within their rights and may even have inadvertently benefited others, they have still acted immorally. In the case of the recent hurricane in Texas, many say,
“No, you don’t understand. Many of these people aren’t even from Houston. They knew the hurricane was coming and bought up a bunch of water at regular prices, with the express intent of coming to Houston and selling it for huge profits, while others were giving water away for free. That’s immoral!”

First, anyone selling water at any price is obviously serving people who don’t have access to the free water. If the buyers had access to free water, they wouldn’t pay for it, at inflated prices or not. Second, this sanctimonious moralizing begs the question, “Why didn’t you buy up a bunch of water and go to Houston and sell it at regular prices?”

The answers to the latter question are many, but they can be summarized as follows: most people do not have the time, capital or expertise to do what the price gougers did.

Who can afford to take off from their own job or cease running their own business to start a whole new one on a few days notice, much less donate their time? Some can, but not most, which is why after all those who can be by charitable work are served, there is still a market for those seeking profits.

We Need Price Gougers
Lost in all the moralizing is the reality that the so-called price gougers face all the same challenges as anyone else, having to forego whatever income they otherwise would have earned if not for their disaster-relief project, and face the risk of losing future income because they took off from their jobs or put their own regular businesses on hold. These losses and risks must be compensated, which is another reason they sell products at a premium price, in addition to supply/demand realities.

Thus, in the real world, even with as many people as are able acting as charitably as possible, there is a need for those seeking profits from higher-than-normal margins, whose self-interested actions save lives and mitigate the devastating effects of disasters. Yet, the rest of the world condemn them and governments seek to punish them, threatening not only the price gougers, but those whose lives they may save or whose suffering they may lessen during the next disaster.

Reprinted from Tom Mullen.

Tom MullenTom Mullen is the author of Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness? and A Return to Common  Sense: Reawakening Liberty in the Inhabitants of America. For more information and more of Tom's writing, visit www.tommullen.net.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.