JT and RA set the hare running in the comments to an earlier post about Fiat Currencies In The Movies, so just to summarise...
1. The underlying theme of Western films set pre-1850 or thereabouts is usually white settlers versus Red Indians (aka Native Americans), and the underlying theme of those set post-1850 is usually about established white settlers/small holders fighting off Large Evil Businesses, such as railroad companies, mining companies or property developers (sometimes they are about white settlers fighting off outlaws, but as like as not, said outlaws are in the pay of the LEB's).
2. See e.g. Once Upon A Time In The West, Heaven's Gate or Pale Rider. They used exactly the same basic plot in Nowhere To Run, which is a Western in a modern setting, and property developers are the stereotypical baddies in modern children's films such as The Borrowers or Hannah Montana: The Movie (" there is a firm battle developing with the residents of Crowley Corners and a team of developers who are planning to destroy the meadows and build a shopping mall on the site"). The final bit of Miss Potter follows the template as well.
3. There were a couple of documentaries on television recently which fit into the overall scheme:
a) The one about Abraham Lincoln says that before the Civil War, he was not so much anti-slavery or pro-emancipation (that was later forced upon him by events) but anti-slave, i.e. anti-Negro. He assumed that because all the land had now been appropriated, there was a limited pool of money left over available for wages of labourers and that it was better for the poor white Europeans to earn these wages than for the rich landowners to import even cheaper labour from Africa (again, whether he was subconsciously anti-landowner or just racist or a bit of both was unclear).
b) The one about Wyatt Earp said that all the fighting and tension in Tombstone was between the middle class urban people/farmers and the cowboys, who were the lowest of the low, as they had turned up too late to be given any land for free and led a semi-nomadic existence carrying out acts of brutality on behalf of the big landowners who employed them. Earp himself was just a lawman of no particular political views, but we see the same as with Lincoln, it's not clear whether the real struggle was against the landless minions of the large landowners or against the landowners themselves (one of the people whom Earp shot dead was such a large landowner).
4. So, in movies as in real life, whether the baddies are Native Americans, slaves, cowboys or large landowners (railroad and mining companies are of their very nature large landowners), all these battles are about land ownership and not just land but rents; there was no danger that the disorganised cowboys would obtain title to land by terrorising the townsfolk of Tombstone, but by so terrorising, they certainly depressed the rental value of the land. This is the Faux Libertarian contradiction: no, we don't want the government restrict our actions; but yes, we do want the government to restrict the actions of others because, er, we were here first.
5. The key scene in Once Upon... is where Cheyenne asks what is so bloody important about the dry acre of land to which the heroine's murdered husband had staked a claim and which the evil railroad company is trying to prise off her by fair means or foul. Charles Bronson's character explains patiently that because of the topography, the acre is in the likely path of the coming railroad, and because of a nearby river or spring, it happens to be exactly in the right place for building a train station.
OK, replies Cheyenne, what's so important about a train station?
Bronson then explains the concept of agglomeration. Once the station is built, that is the best place to build an inn (the murdered husband already had an inn sign carved) or to have the post office. It's also the best place to build shops, because the goods can be picked up straight from the station, so other settlers will want to live near the station; those who live further away will visit the shops, post office and stay overnight at the inn; the existence of the station (built at the railroad company's expense and ultimately funded by its passengers) is enough to trigger a whole new little town, and once the town is built, the land will be worth millions. 6. In other words, the murdered man merely wanted to steal a march on the railroad company and collect all these rents for himself by staking his claim where he did. He had ordered enough timber for the first few buildings, so effectively, he was trying to blackmail the railroad company and they get their own back by killing him, which triggers a further cycle of violence.
In the film, the railroad company is portrayed as the baddies, because they employ the more violent minions, but in economic terms, they are as bad as each other. More to the point, the LEBs who are called upon to play the baddies in film after film are clearly rent seekers, they want to make easy money by owning certain locations or mining rights, but aren't the heroes in these films fighting for the same thing, i.e. rents?
7. To what extent all these Western films represent what actually happened, I do not know, but there must be some truth in them. Now, as a thought experiment: what would have happened if the Founding Fathers had followed Tom Paine's sage advice (in turn based on what Queen Elisabeth had actually done for real in England two centuries earlier) and stopped these rents falling into competing private hands (which is what triggered all the unpleasantness) by having the government collect them, spending a little on things which enhance rental values (i.e. law enforcement, irrigation, railroads, whatever) and dishing out the rest as a Citizen's Dividend?
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UPDATE (for my own future reference), there's also a scene in "The World's Fastest Indian" where Anthony Hopkins' neighbours complain that he never mows his lawn and this depresses property values. The only film which shows the downsides of new infrastructure, i.e. the negative impact on land values elsewhere, is "Cars". The cars live in a sleepy little town on the old Route 66, which has been dying off since the new interstate was built.
