Mad Max: Fury Road; Our Rothbardian Future

Mad Max is back in 2015 with the latest sequel, Mad Max: Fury Road.

To the classic fans of the Mad Max franchise, sorry, Mel Gibson is out.

Who’s in? Tom Hardy (who played Bane in The Dark Knight Rises) and Charlize Theron (known for general hotness).

If you’re not already familiar with the storyline, it’s pretty simply: post-apocalyptic society, no laws, fuel and water-based economy.

As the trailer interjects, “A world without hope, without law, without mercy.”

So basically the portrayal is full-on anarchy.

Now, anarchists don’t respond well when you paint their utopian, government-free, fictional society as a hyper-violent future where only the strong or the mad survive.

Those who follow Murray Rothbard, a self-professed economist and author of over a dozen books on anarchist theory, maintain hope that a society without law would not devolve into “hell on earth,” because of little thing called the non-aggression principle (NAP).

To sum it up, if the people living in a law-less society simply stuck to the “principle” of not initiating force against others, everything would be fine and dandy.

The world would be rainbows and unicorns all around.

However, those who live in reality would settle for a little security in a limited government . . . just in case a few folks choose to step out of line and show their teeth to get a scrap of food.

Back to Mad Max: Fury Road, this will be the fourth movie of the franchise with a May 2015 release date.

Movie-goers can ponder the benefits of a stateless society as they watch the latest release and also be thankful that Tina Turner won’t be appearing in this one.

Morgan is a freelance writer for a variety of publications covering popular culture, societal behavior and the political influences of each.