If inflation increases at a similar rate, the brilliant corporate leaders were engaging in this ridiculously expensive mission for a mineral that sells at the equivalent of $973,000 per kilo in 2009.

I saw the movie as libertarian in its message of tolerance and anarchistic in its anti-imperialism and implicit support of a plurality of property and social arrangements. Maybe I’ll write about the topic on my own blog.

With such a valuable resource, I agree, it seems unlikely that only one firm would attempt to extract it. I think this just exposes Cameron’s simplistic. anti-capitalist imagination. I wonder, though whether $20m is still a great sum of money when Avatar takes place. Perhaps another libertarian message in the movie is directed at central bank inflation policy: in the future, a million bucks might be spare change. Otherwise, if 20 million were still a fortune, then surely on the vast planet/satellite of Pandora there would have been sufficient deposits of unobtainium which weren’t lying directly beneath population centers to satisfy Earth’s energy needs.

This post was mentioned on Twitter by libertyideals: Avatar’s Unintentional Libertarian Message? #libertarian http://bit.ly/6CqkYE…