30th
Saw Capitalism: A Love Story last night. Aside from the fact that it could have been titled Catholicism: A Love Story, the thing that really struck me where the examples Michael Moore used to make his point. From the beginning, the film makes a parallel between the excesses that fell the Roman empire and the ones that are causing the facade of capitalism to crack now. But again and again, the examples he used showed what happens when companies get government regulators to give them preferential treatment.
Moore has never been concerned with details. He’d rather arrive at a bank with an armored truck than interview an employee, or show the emotional porn of a family getting kicked out of their house than give any background or context about what brought the bank to their door. And some of his examples hit their mark. (I’d never heard of dead peasant policies before and it’s hard to think of a rational argument for them.)
But from a private detention facility that got subsidies and convictions through a corrupt judge to the 2008 bailout fiasco, many of his examples show the disastrous results of government intervention.
Moore is particularly upset by sweetheart loans made out to Senators and Congressmen as poor families get kicked out of their homes because of much less beneficial terms. But buying off Senators isn’t capitalism. It’s cronyism.
Repeatedly, Moore uses examples that prove government intervention in economic interactions leads to disastrous results, even when it stems from an altruistic place. I know he thinks this is the fault of capitalism, but the examples he uses (mixed with all the pro-Catholicism) often look like stuff that would turn up in a book by Tim Carney.
