The paltry number of filmed examples of the invisible hand is perhaps
itself in need of explanation. After all, business, growth and
innovation are the most visible aspects of the industrialised world we
live in. The development of the cinema during the past century is itself
a clear example of the invisible hand in action. On the day that Queen
Victoria died in 1901, there were no cinemas in the whole of England and
only a handful of films were being produced across the world. By 1914,
there were 3,500 cinemas in the UK alone and there were 300 new releases
per month (see Patrick Beaver, The Spice of Life, 1979: 104-05). As
Beaver noted, “over a period of twenty years, a form of advanced magic
lantern developed from a novelty into a major industry” (ibid. 105).
Today, whatever number there might be of either cinemas or new releases,
the films we see today are beyond comparison with what existed just a
century ago. This is not government; this is the invisible hand of the
market just doing what it does.

Ludwig von Mises may have made what is perhaps the definitive statement
on why we do not find the invisible hand in the films we see. He wrote,
in an “Epilogue” to his Socialism, which was written I suspect
around 1946 (the Liberty Classics edition I have (publication date 1981)
says it is a translation from the 1932 second edition, but this epilogue
was unmistakably written immediately after the war. Anyway, what Mises
wrote was this (pp 539-40), which I find quite apposite to the
discussion we have been having:

"The readers of picture magazines and the movie-fans long for the
picturesque. The operatic pageants of the Fascists and the Nazis and the
parading of the girl-battalions of the Red army are after their heart.
It is more fun to listen to the radio speeches of a dictator than to
study economic treatises. The entrepreneurs and technologists who pave
the way for economic improvement work in seclusion; their work is not
suitable to be visualised on the screen."

Steven Kates