If you ever doubt the power of popular culture to affect events, just consider Britain’s mid-century film comedies. A movie I had never seen until yesterday illustrates this well.

In Penny Princess, a fizzy 1953 comedy from the Rank Organization (shown early this past Sunday morning on Turner Classic Movies), the tiny, fictional European country of Lampidorra has based its economy on smuggling for hundreds of years. They produce nothing of value, and economic innovation is nil. In addition, their concept of civil rights is hazy at best.

When the country decides to go legit, exporting a cheese called Schneeze (it becomes wildly popular because it contains schnapps and makes people tipsy), the surrounding nations of France, Switzerland, and Italy impose crushing tariffs.

The country’s sovereign—a young American female (Yolande Donlan); this is a comedy, all right—decides to make it state policy to smuggle the schneeze into those countries, to avoid the protectionist tariffs and enable the country’s economic innovation to thrive. As a result, Lampidorra becomes the only fiscally solvent country in Europe. It’s a delicious lesson in the superiority of market competition over government fiat and corporate rent-seeking.

Originating from several different studios and a multitude of directors and writers, numerous film comedies produced between the late 1930s and early 1960s swam strongly against the leftist cultural tides of the time. These films illustrated and indeed openly expounded the values of free markets, individual initiative, low taxes, social mobility, individual generosity, the rule of law, the value of religion and sound moral values, and the humble joys of bourgeois life. They roundly satirized government interference and incompetence, and they ridiculed the nation’s complacent, sclerotic cultural institutions.

The Ealing studio sent out a stream of excellent comedies, several of which starred Alec Guinness as an English Everyman who battles corrupt government, business, and labor union interests. The Man in the White Suit and All at Sea are among the studio’s finest and most overtly economically liberal films (in the classical sense), and Whiskey Galore, Passport to Pimlico, and The Titfield Thunderbolt stand out in their support of local political sovereignty as well as the importance of economic freedom and the unleashing of individual initiative. Films such as Hue and Cry,  An Inspector Calls, Kind Hearts and Coronets, The Ladykillers, The Lavender Hill Mob, and others upheld the rule of law and showed that both goodness and evil are found in profusion among all social classes.

The Boulting Brothers produced a splendid run of satirical comedies mocking Britain’s sclerotic mid-century socialist state and promoting classical liberalism. I’m All Right, Jack, starring Peter Sellers and the also brilliant Ian Carmichael, is at the peak of their achievements and a true film classic. In fact, I’d say it’s one of the essentials.

The Rank Organization put out numerous films of the same sort during the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s, including Penny Princess. And numerous other small producers did likewise.

This flowering of culture supporting classical liberal ideas—free markets, individual initiative, local sovereignty, and solid middle-class values—was the world in which Maggie Thatcher and those who elected her spent their formative years.

We could certainly benefit from a turn toward such principles among our current cultural artisans.

In the meantime, we have these fine old movies to keep us laughing and start us thinking.

Highly recommended.