Ohhh, I’m feeling my free-market, libertarian oats! Hang on!

So, these newspaper editorial cartoonists are belly-aching about how newspapers are cutting their jobs. Of course, the newspaper industry is stumbling downhill. Circulation is plummeting, revenue is drying — times are tough.

Apparently, these cartoonists believe newspapers should keep them on the payroll at all costs. They depict themselves as the sole defenders against evil government. Judging from their cartoons about the downsizing, evil rich people who invest in their newspapers are demanding obscene profits, and because the evil rich people want to maximize profit from a business, they are cutting the cartoonists’ jobs in an effort to “stifle dissenting voices.”

But for the presence of those crucial, daily editorial cartoons buried on the next to last page of your morning paper (What? You haven’t seen your local paper’s editorial page in several years?! Impossible!), the wheels would come off of the country and we’d all be goose-stepping in time with the Bush Administration in a matter of days.

In the 105 cartoons the artists concocted for “Black Ink Monday,” a non-violent protest of evil newspaper corporations getting rid of cartoonists, there are plenty of potshots at capitalism. I can only deduce that the cartoonists:

A: Understand capitalism and simply resent that demand for their services is becoming unsustainable…

OR

B: Do not understand capitalism and believe their important work must supersede the existence of money with which to pay them.

Industries grow, mature and die. Newspapers seem to be nearing death. The work of editorial cartoonists has not died. Thanks to the Internet, there are massive new opportunities — dare I say, the most in history — to get your cartoons out to the masses. If you’re really good, you can charge money for them, and the free market will support your great ideas. If you aren’t really good, the free market will reject you. You’ll have to go find something else to do.

So, I left a little message-poo on their comment board. If you don’t care to click on the link, read below!

If people found editorial cartooning so desirable and necessary in their lives, they’d continue to buy the newspaper — but they are buying fewer newspapers.

It has nothing to do with evil corporations stifling free speech, as some of these outrageous cartoons imply. People don’t get their news from the paper anymore. That’s just the breaks.

Learn Flash and do some animated work. They are popular. People forward dozens of them to me. It’s the medium of the age. Use it.

The market is speaking. If there was sustainable demand for your work, the market would respond to meet the demand.

Industries change or die.

Sorry.