Michael Moore is a very sick and confused person. His documentaries consist of blatant lies, deliberate misrepresentations and skewed viewpoints of relatively easy-to-analyze situations.
He once described capitalism as a game of three-card Monte where the dealer (evil capitalists) wins at the expense of everyone else. This is my analysis of the three hypocrite cards he laid down in a recent interview with GRITtv.
“[Money is] a national resource. That’s ours. We all have this, we all benefit from this, or we all suffer as a result of not having it.”
If it’s not clear, he’s talking about too much money being concentrated into the hands of too few people. The first problem is that he doesn’t respect property rights.
The Pilgrims and citizens of the Soviet Union are most likely screaming from their graves in support of private property. As they very well know, communal goods lead to the free rider problem, and the free rider problem always leads to mass scarcity.
Moore makes the common mistake of confusing money with wealth. Real money is scarce. Wealth is not. Wealth is always expanding, especially as technology advances. It isn’t a zero-sum game. Only in the case of taxation and other forms of theft does someone profit at the expense of someone else.
“We need to see these jobs as something that we own … that we collectively own as Americans. And you just can’t steal our jobs and take them someplace else.”
This is when Moore shoots himself in the foot. You absolutely cannot be a national socialist without being an international socialist. The inconsistencies of the former are way too prevalent to defend. He previously stated that certain people can’t privately own money, but he’s arguing that only Americans can privately own these jobs. This is an extremely nationalist viewpoint of society in how he views Americans as somehow more worthy than people on the other side of an invisible line who would be completely satisified taking the same job for a little less in compensation.
“This country is not broke. […] There is a ton of cash in this country. Trillions of dollars of It”.
This is correct, except he doesn’t understand what it means. This country is not broke at all. Nothing that we own is going to disappear unless the government steals it. The government is the entity that’s broke, and it’s due to the social programs Moore so vehemently promotes.
Medicare loses nearly four times the amount of money that health insurers make. Every service that the government provides can be provided with better quality and at a cheaper price in the free market. These programs are the debt.
If you want to see a bankrupt country, just wait until we get to QE7 and the Federal Reserve completely monetizes the government’s debt with a monopolized currency.
That hyperinflation should be really fun to deal with.
Think about the cost of popcorn and a drink in a movie theater, and then apply that concept to everything else in the world.
Until then, take each thing Michael Moore says with about 17,000 grains of salt.
Reach Brian at brian.p.anderson@asu.edu
