Cynthia Meyer, Staff Writer
Ideology: Conservative | Writing From: George Washington University
Michael Moore has sunk to a new low with his most recent movie, Capitalism: A Love Affair. In the film, he concludes that capitalism, the basis of the American economy, is “evil.”
In ‘Capitalism,’ Moore asserts that the profit motive ruins the lives of good people and that business owners have only the interest of their business at heart, not the interests of the people. He also argues capitalism benefits the rich and condemns people into poverty.
Moore is wrong, on all fronts. Profit motive fuels the American economy. The beauty of capitalism is that a company’s drive for profit does not contradict the interests of the people, the consumers. What Moore does not take into account is that while profit is the primary goal of business, their competitors keep them in check. Under a competitive, capitalist economy, a company cannot burden its consumers with unreasonably high prices because similar companies will welcome their business. The same goes for labor—if one company sets employee wages too low, competing companies will offer higher wages for similar quality employees.
What I find to actually be “evil” is the manipulation and degradation of American workers by these anti-capitalists. They strive to make employees of companies feel like they need the government to speak for
them, because they cannot speak for themselves. Anti-capitalists devalue personal success and individual strength of workers, while instead stressing government dependency. It is the capitalist that realizes the value of hard work, and rewards it. It is the capitalist that recognizes employees can speak for themselves through the measure of their work, rather than rely on the hand of government to distribute “to each according to his need, from each according to his ability.” The fact of the matter is that the government cannot encourage workers to rely on themselves. It can only encourage them to rely on the government and feed its crave for more power. It is an insult to mankind that we should need such a regulating force, that we cannot hold our own by the value of our work.
Michael Moore said, “You have to eliminate [capitalism] and replace it with something that is good for all people and that something is democracy.” But capitalism, in its most basic form, is democracy. The people—the consumers—choose whom they do business with. The people have the power to make or break their political leaders based on how they vote, and they also have the power to make or break a company based on where they choose to put their hard earned dollars.
To put it simply, our economy should mimic nature—where the perfect balance is achieved without outside interferences. Just as the equilibrium of the food chain should not be imposed upon, neither should our economy. And while some may feel sympathy for lousy companies with lousy products falling to competition, this survival of the fittest approach is undeniably what is best for society. We want the best quality products at the lowest possible price. Only capitalism can achieve this end.
Michael Moore has said that a revolt against “evil” capitalism has already begun in this country, using Barack Obama’s election as evidence. But Moore has it wrong again, as he usually does. The American people are frustrated with even just the talk of more government control of the private sector. The big-spenders in Washington are growing more and more unpopular, while Obama recently faced the largest protest of his policies since his election. If there is a “revolt” rising in the political atmosphere of this country, it is a revolt against big-government, not capitalism.
Too often, capitalism is polluted with government regulation. This can cause problems in our economy with a misdirected blame put on the merits of capitalism, rather than the government. Politicians pointed to evil, greedy capitalists as the culprits of the housing crisis, when in reality, the cause was government regulation beginning in the early 1990s—encouraging the careless expansion of homeownership and making taxpayers to assume the responsibility of risky housing loans.
Capitalism is not perfect, but in practice, no system is. The fundamental issue at hand is the question of power. Should power lie in the hands of the government, or the people? Should we be free to choose how to run our businesses, or should we submit to the authority of the federal government? Should we surrender our economic freedom to the government in exchange for a more “fair” and “moral” economic environment?
Luckily for Michael Moore, the government is only considering the complete overhaul of the healthcare industry, and not the entertainment industry. We wouldn’t want the millions he makes off of his outrageous films (thanks to “evil capitalism”) to be in jeopardy.
AMEN.
You continue to claim that capitalism is somehow the most democratic economic system, but your Utopian idea of capitalism doesn’t exist anywhere in the world.
The real capitalism, like our system, doesn’t empower the people. It empowers the CEOs and the bosses. You claim that if one firm pays too little, an employee can simply get a job at a different firm that pays more, which brings wages to an equilibrium. But that’s not what happens in practice. What really happens is much closer to a sort of wage slavery. Situations like when single mothers can’t afford child care, so they get a second job, which forces them to keep their kids in child care longer, which is more expensive. It’s a vicious cycle.
You can’t simply write-off one system as undemocratic. It’s more complicated than that. Under one system you decry, we have elected representatives regulating and controlling the economy. Under the system you defend, we have unelected people – the Bernie Madoffs of the world – essentially running the show. In this system, consumers and laborers have relatively little control.
Which sounds more democratic to you?
“when in reality, the cause was government regulation beginning in the early 1990s”
I believe it was a little closer to de-regulation. First, if you’re starting in the “early 90′s” are you including the spending and tax hikes of the Democratic Congress of H.W. Bush’s presidency as part of the cause? H.W. didn’t have much of a direct cause on the housing market.
Clinton did a lot to de-regulate restrictions on loans. http://www.huduser.org/publications/txt/hdbrf2.txt (Scroll down near the bottom to the section “The National Homeownership Strategy
“) All of these “shady” types of loans were targeted at those who were most susceptible to not making payments, as low-income jobs are rarely permanent, and generally the first to go in a recession. (as skilled workers are more valuable to a struggling company than unskilled workers)
Although I don’t place 100% of the blame on this issue, I believe it was the first snowball that began the avalanche.
We can also see from this that government regulation has a place. The issue is when that regulation oversteps the boundaries of its intent. Regulations should be well thought out and focus on long-term economic goals, instead of short term.
Full de-regulation will lead to very short-term economic increases. This is because the average person does not think in terms of long-term, sustained, growth. Most just want to get a lot of money fast, then get out. The easiest way to get a lot of money fast is to exploit workers, the environment, and your competitors (to the point of removing them).
Neither low, nor high, regulation has positively benefited us in the long run. We must strike a balance whereby regulation preserves competition and prevents our workers from being exploited unwillingly. (A person with no time or money cannot put that money back into the system purchasing things like computers, cars, or TV’s)
Ian,
Reading your response, I get the feeling you don’t read the article. You just see opposing points of view. I would point out the counter arguments to your post, but I feel Cynthia laid them out quite well. Read the article again my friend.
In response to Ian Goldin. You have it backwards.
No system is perfect, but capitalism, with all of its blemishes, is superior to any system yet devised to deal with our everyday needs and desires. You say that employees have to succumb to a “sort of wage slavery”. Criticism of capitalism on these grounds is connected to the belief that one should have freedom to work without a boss or obligation. Human beings sell their potential to do labor in a “market” where the number of possible buyers is large enough so as to allow some range in choice of employer. We are free to chose our own employer and if we work hard, we can even be our own employer.
Capitalism is where everyone is allowed to unleash their minds in order to produce and achieve. Yes, it is not the best economic system for the lazy and you don’t get rich being a moron. You have to use your mind and/or muscle.
Capitalism rewards those who work hard and punishes the lazy. It’s the only economic system on earth that does this. This is why it works.
Ayn Rand once said:
“The moral justification for capitalism lies in the fact that it is the only system consonant with man’s rational nature, that it protects man’s survival qua man, and that its ruling principle is: justice.”
Moore’s film does not come out until October. Unless you’ve managed to see it already, I’ll take this as a premature critique.
I was going to respond to your criticism of government “regulation” but I won’t belabor anything that Matthew has already mentioned. Well said, Matthew.
Ian…you need to take a simple course in economics. Perhaps then the law of supply and demand will become clear to you.
You are right in saying that capitalism in its purest form, just may be the “freest” and most “democratic” system yet created – a system in which you rely on yourself and your own work to succeed, a system that as you said, really mimics the competitive resource competition of nature. In capitalism, you get ahead by watching out for yourself (or your family), you hoard the most resources to yourself at all costs, and the more you get the more successful that makes you and society on the whole. It’s pretty close to perfect, right?… you do what’s good for you, and it’s good for all. It’s certainly not racist or sexist, it’s all about how smart and how good you are at working – it is the survival of the fittest.
The problem is that obviously some people will be more successful in this structure than others, and those who aren’t can easily be left with nothing. Capitalism without any government intervention gives us the luxury to let them fall, and say that it’s “their own fault”.
Even Adam Smith warned in “Wealth on Nations” that the capitalist system, while it would be incredibly efficient and compel many to work, would require inequity (as competition is a driving force) and has the potential to create great poverty as the most successful hoard more and more capital, and more and more power. Moore is right in saying that the system ‘condemns people into poverty.’
This is what has happened. Internationally, the global north dominates the global south. In the United States, the wealthy live excessively while the poor don’t have health care. What happens with this, then, is a vicious cycle. Those born into poverty, no matter how smart, because their parents “didn’t work hard enough”, don’t have access to decent education to learn about what valuable work they could do with their great minds. They probably have to work from age 14 and with nothing competitive to offer an employer, they have to take the lowest wage, and live month to month. And then their kids also probably wont get access to education, and will also live in poverty. While there are exceptions, pulling yourself up by your bootstraps is just not the norm anymore. It is a vicious cycle… is this really because people in poverty don’t work hard enough? I just don’t think so.
Government intervention is the only current counter to this inherent systemic problem. It tries to put teachers in areas of poverty, it tries to spread out the wealth a little bit by using taxes to create social benefit programs, it tries to ensure that people don’t die because they are poor… it tries to get more and more people back into the competitive structure. It certainly has bureacratic problems, but
thinking that this kind of government power is bad for people is an opinion of the privileged.
I certainly don’t agree with Moore that the system is “evil.” It’s completely a-moral, to think it is evil is to think that people are evil. Capitalism just mimics nature as you said, but I (maybe naively) think people are more compassionate than animals in the natural world, and I think we have enough empathy to structure our system in a way that catches people who fall.
We should start with health care.
“Capitalism just mimics nature as you said, but I (maybe naively) think people are more compassionate than animals in the natural world, and I think we have enough empathy to structure our system in a way that catches people who fall.”
Capitalism has a solution for this–it’s called charity. If people were, by nature, as “compassionate” as you suggest, we even give them a tax credit and encourage them to behave that way.
Suggesting that government ought to be a charity because people, deep down, are “compassionate” is tyranny of the worst kind.
Without a strong sense of private property, there is no incentive to innovate. Destroying this through over regulation and your own personal moral code is perhaps the most atrocious suggestion for anti-capitalism that I have ever seen.
Capitalism works. It has pulled hundreds of millions of people from poverty. It’s not perfect, but it is stupid to compare it to “perfect.” What it should be compared to is other economic systems, where it will be abundantly clear that nothing has harnessed the power of the human mind like a system that directly rewards success and severely punishes failure. No more efficient method of resource allocation is known as of today.
This continued destruction of capitalism must end, or the U.S. is going to wonder where it went wrong and why it can no longer compete in the world economy. It may not be too long into the future.
Cynthia, I agree with your defense of capitalism in the face of opponents like Michael Moore. However, I agree with Tyler that since the movie doesn’t come out until October, we will not know the extent of his argument until then.
Tim, I wholeheartedly also agree wholeheartedly with Tim. Capitalism may not be “perfect,” but no system is. Inefficient government social programs should be replaced entirely by private charity; naturally, however, with enormous tax breaks and incentives as to insure the continued support of those in need.
This article really wasn’t a critique of the movie. It was talking about the beliefs that Michael Moore holds and has made clear prior to the release of the movie.
Tim:
Providing social services to the less able is not about government working as a charitable tyranny, and that is definitely NOT what I was saying. It is about using government to channel the greater aims of society, and to ensure sustainability in the long run.
We should be wholly in charge of our government, and its actions, and you’re right it shouldn’t be about the State dictating our morals to us. If the majority of people do not want the government to provide social services, then so be it. I just don’t think this is the case.
Is public education tyrannical? Is the postal service tyrannical? Is medicare, or government run clinics, or government sponsored vaccines that stop the spread of disease and prevent millions of people from getting sick, somehow a problem? Even if you personally think so, or think that the inefficiencies of these programs demonstrate the failure of government, i can guarantee the majority of Americans who enjoy these services certainly do not agree with you. They expect their taxes to be used to serve them, not govern them.
Government SHOULD BE the morality of capitalism. Capitalism is a great system, no doubt, but it needs a checking mechanism. Government regulation can be used to look at the broader picture that capitalism’s short term profit margin windows don’t consider. We all know that industry shouldn’t pollute into rivers, for both moral reasons and for long term societal health reasons, but it’s still cheaper to do so. We asked our government to regulate this because without regulation that takes the future into account, the profit priorities of capitalism would require industry to pollute unchecked until it became too expensive not to, at which point the state of our environment would be a health hazard.
We ask our government to invest in public education in poor neighborhoods (and all neighborhoods) not because we feel SORRY for them, or wish to give charity to the other half, that is ridiculous. It is because it is in our greatest interest to do that, crime rates are highest in low-income communities, and through trying to get people out of poverty, we enjoy a safer society on the whole. The growing gap between rich and poor in this country means that we are creating a less and less able bodied workforce for the future, inhibiting our long term sustainability. But capitalism by itself does not account for this… there is no incentive to in the short term. We use government not as a charity but as a mechanism to account for market failures, and to put boundaries on where the drive for profit can take you.
“It is about using government to channel the greater aims of society, and to ensure sustainability in the long run.”
What makes you think government can do this better than a market?
Underlying this belief, which is more like a religion than legitimate inquiry, is that doing “something” is always better than doing “nothing.”
I’m here to say that is not only more often false than true and also that abuse of government power and over regulation has destroyed more lives and more wealth than any measurable market-related evil that you can identify.
“Government SHOULD BE the morality of capitalism.”
Funny, I thought consumers should be the morality of capitalism. Forgive me for my stupidity. I forgot that the government is always smarter than me, and always and everywhere makes better choices than the individual.
“Is public education tyrannical? Is the postal service tyrannical? Is medicare, or government run clinics, or government sponsored vaccines that stop the spread of disease and prevent millions of people from getting sick, somehow a problem?”
So if something good comes from tyranny, it becomes less tyrannical? To answer your questions specifically, yes, yes but it’s a constitutional entitlement, and absolutely yes.
Like I said, the assumption that doing “something” is always better than doing “nothing” underlies these problems. It is very difficult to measure the distorting effect of so much government intervention, and so this is the side we seldom ever see. That doesn’t make it any less terrible that the government has taken something from us that we never knew we had.
The environment is a great example. Regulating rather than internalizing the costs of negative externalities like pollution is theorized to been the most destructive anti-growth policy that this country has passed since 1973. There’s also a significant amount of discussion in the literature that suggests this has been a large factor in the stagnation of our growth rate over the last 35+ years (which followed some of the best growth this country has ever seen, in the years prior to that). And it did so without huge deficits in trade or government spending, and during that time, the standard of living in the United States increased substantially.
Public education is also an excellent example. As Becker has argued quite effectively since 1955, there are “human capital” factors that have significant positive effects on our economy as a whole. But to suggest that it is in our interest for public education to exist is not an argument for the status quo. There is little doubt that tenure, unionization, and other factors have had terrible negative effects on both the quality of education for the average student and the compensation necessary to draw the best teachers.
There is no doubt that there currently exists an education deficit in this country, and it’s primarily caused by a bureaucratic and unaccountable, unionized workforce that continues to do deplorable things to the American taxpayer, rich and poor.
If we are going to realize the gains from capitalism, we must have growth. Absent growth, the moral arguments for capitalism rapidly disappear. The long hours, hard work, blood, and sweat that capitalism requires is not justifiable without an optimal increase in standard of living over time. All the good things that you want from capitalism–for them to be sustainable–requires growth. And there’s no doubt that poorly crafted regulation and other policy is the surest way to create the inefficiency that is destroying growth, that is beneficial even to people outside our economy.
I will state here that you will be hard pressed to find a market failure that exists in the absence of government regulation. If the government is CREATING market failures, what does that say about it, as an institution? We live mostly isolated from the worst of these failures in the world (currency crisis, anyone?), but don’t be so sure that we aren’t bearing the costs every day.
Those that are “sure” that markets seldom function and exist to serve the interests of a select few simply deny the facts. As you point out, there are arguments for intervention, but I can tell you that from my observations, we do a piss poor job of it, and I’d rather we do nothing than the wrong thing because the potential consequences are often far less than the suffering government can and does cause.
If Michael Moore REALLY believes Capitalism is so evil, then why didn’t he just give away copies of his documentary —he could have posted the docu on You Tube, or his website, and promoted it on Twitter.
And if Capitalism is so evil, then why give money to the evil capitalists that own the networks where your ad promoting your film on the evils of capitalism will be aired, and as such will put more money in the pockets of ‘evil’ capitalists that run the networks, which run the ads that encourage the people to go to the theater run by capitalists and pay to buy a ticket to watch the film so that the distributer who is also a capitalist can recoup the money he paid to Michael by screening the film in the theaters that charge the non capitalists to view a movie on the evils of Capitalism which helps the man who hates capitalism … get rich!
Isn’t it Ironic?