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I just saw Michael Moore’s Capitalism: a Love Story. I agree with the critics who say that, although Michael Moore attacks both Republicans and Democrats for their role in the current economic mess, he still upholds President Obama as a possible agent of hope and change. That, even though he points out that Obama’s Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner, is about as incompetent as they come!
Michael Moore says near the end of the movie that capitalism is too evil to be regulated, so it must be eliminated. But I’m not sure what he wants to replace capitalism with. He celebrates the time when the United States had a solid middle class and a thriving automobile industry, part of which he attributes to lack of competition from other countries (i.e., Germany and Japan) immediately after World War II. He also supports unions, along with businesses that have a genuinely democratic structure, which actually ends up making them money. So is he against capitalism—as in people owning private property, buying, and selling? Or does he prefer a certain form of capitalism that doesn’t just benefit the well-to-do?
Michael Moore lauds Franklin Roosevelt’s second Bill of Rights, which included the right to a job, a living wage, health care, a pension, etc. But I wonder how FDR planned for this to work in real life. Can the government guarantee every single human being a job? Is that even possible?
Part of my problem is that I don’t entirely know what the “socialist” countries of Europe are like. As far as I know, private property and businesses exist in Europe, so there is production going on. That means the government doesn’t totally own the means of production and use them for the “public good.” But it does tax people heavily so it can pay for social services. And I’ve also heard that some European countries have rules against firing people, as well as make it expensive to hire new employees. The result is high unemployment in Europe. But the unemployed still have a safety net to fall back on because of government policies, so they’re not living in abject poverty. That’s my impression of Europe based on what I’ve heard and read, and I welcome tactful, friendly correction.
Near the beginning of the movie and also in the middle, Michael Moore was interviewing people who were about to lose their homes. Some of them had their homes for decades. This somewhat took me aback because I understood the housing crisis primarily to be about people who bought houses they couldn’t afford, resulting in a debt they did not pay. But some of these people refinanced homes they already had. I had to look up “refinance,” and I found that it means replacing old terms of a loan with new terms. I’m not entirely clear about why people were doing that. What were they hoping to gain? While critics of the movie say Michael Moore didn’t focus on the greed of those who bought houses they couldn’t afford, he actually did touch on that at one point in the movie: he said banks were trying to tell people that they were private banks because their homes were worth a lot. He called this “the bank of you.” But there’s a lot that I don’t understand here.
Probably my favorite part of the movie was when Michael Moore was featuring U.S. Representatives speaking against the bail-out, playing a dramatic soundtrack as they did so. My problem, however, was that the only people he featured doing so were Democrats. During the whole bail-out debate, there were Republicans who were criticizing our whole system of “capitalizing gains, and socializing losses.” I wish he had interviewed them, or shown their speeches.
Another powerful part of the movie was when Michael Moore was juxtaposing the United States with a documentary about ancient Rome—with its disparity of wealth, its lack of jobs for the unskilled, its large slave class, its escapism through entertainment and races, its emperor (juxtaposed with Dick Cheney), etc.
Michael Moore also had a strong Christian element in his movie, for he interviewed Catholic priests and referred to Bible passages about not being greedy. I think he does well to question the tendency of many to associate capitalism with Christianity. After all, Christianity does not glorify greed, it honors the poor, and it refuses to base people’s worth on how much they make or own. And Jesus never turned away any sick person because of a “pre-existing condition.” But would Jesus totally oppose capitalism? He told the parable of the talents, in which two people use their ingenuity to multiply the talent their master gives them. I know the parable is symbolic, but does it show some sympathy on Jesus’ part towards a free market system?
And, in a time when conservatives appeal to the founding fathers to justify keeping the government out of the economy and health care, Michael Moore presented quotes by them that were rather critical of capitalism. Thomas Jefferson criticized bankers, Benjamin Franklin talked about people only making the amount of money that they needed, and John Adams warned against the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few. I don’t know if these quotes have been fact-checked, though. I doubt that the founding fathers were socialists, for they owned property and supported a limited government. But they were probably concerned about excesses in the economic system at their time. I have no idea if they proposed doing something about them, however.
But I guess the overall question that I walk away with is this: Is there a way to make capitalism work for the vast majority of people, not just the privileged few?
