Issue date: 11/10/09 Section: Opinions

Does Michael Moore's talent as a filmmaker hide the weakness of his arguments? Photo: Steve Rhodes / Flickr

Michael Moore's latest film Capitalism: A Love Story has three acts: the first highlights the ugliest parts of modern American capitalism, the second is about the financial crisis and subsequent bailouts, and the third is a rallying call to fight against capitalism.

Moore's horror stories range from Walmart taking out life insurance on their employees to pilots earning so little money that they must rely on food stamps. Moore's most upsetting story involves a city in Pennsylvania that privatized its juvenile detention system. The company charged with juvenile detention bribed the local judges, who then sentenced innocent teenagers to months of detention. That kind of corruption is sickening, and serves as a reminder that there should be limits on the private sector. But is it an indictment of capitalism as such? Hasn't there been corruption in every mode of economic organization to date?

By contrast, Moore attacks capitalism directly when he talks about pilots' wages. Moore tells us that airlines are exploiting pilots, who love flying so much that they'll accept annual salaries as low as $24,000 a year. But try thinking about it the other way around: the pilots that Moore interviews have made huge sacrifices to do what they love. Other pilots weren't willing to make those sacrifices and found better paying work. The result is that the people who get to fly are the pilots who love flying most.

But even if Moore is lazy about details, Capitalism's first act is only supposed to show that American capitalism isn't thriving, and most reasonable people would agree. However, the second act of the film has more serious problems.

Moore would have us think that the bank bailouts were legalized robbery, and that the Bush administration tricked Congress with the prospect of a second Great Depression, just like they used the supposed existence of WMDs to trick people into supporting the Iraq war. This is simply not an accurate analogy. The danger of another Great Depression was real and imminent; the danger from WMDs was fabricated. Few serious economists doubted the need to stabilize the financial sector; left-leaning economists would have simply used different means. An ideal bank bailout would have punished bankers instead of throwing money at them, and it would lay the groundwork for preventing future crises. These are serious issues, but the Iraq war has probably killed 650,000 people, according to a study in The Lancet, while the bank bailout, for all its problems, succeeded in staving off a severe depression.

In Capitalism's third act, Moore's film-making abilities really shine. The climax of the film consists of a FDR's 1944 state of the union address, where he calls for a second bill of rights regarding economic security. It's hard to overstate how moving this scene is, or how effective Capitalism is when taken as a whole. But Moore paints with too broad a brush. As the film ends, Moore intones that "Capitalism is evil, and you can't regulate evil" and in taking this attitude, he ignores just how successful regulation can be. If the government regulated that families who lost their homes in the housing bust could stay on as renters, or if America had a single-payer healthcare system, there would be less evil in the world today. Maybe I'm a soulless technocrat, but I worry that without real policy substance, Moore's know-nothing populism won't lead to anything better than the "tea parties" that are currently tarnishing America. And that makes Capitalism a missed opportunity.

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