Just as he deceitfully misrepresented the Second Amendment and gun ownership in Bowling for Columbine; deceitfully misrepresented the Bush administration, the troops risking their lives in Iraq, and the United States overall in Fahrenheit 9/11; and deceitfully misrepresented the health care systems in the U.S., Cuba, and other countries in Sicko, the left’s favorite “documentarian” Michael Moore is about to deceitfully misrepresent capitalism and socialism in the film Capitalism: A Love Story.
Now, far be it from me to expect Moore not to exhibit any hypocrisy with this new film. (After all, the man blasted the eeevil Halliburton in F9/11, while all the time he owned Halliburton stock, yet denied it!).
For example, if capitalism is as evil as Moore would have us believe, where does he get off enjoying a million-dollar luxury apartment in Manhattan and a million-dollar beachfront house in Michigan?
If capitalism is as evil as Moore would have us believe, where does he get off sending his child to an expensive private school rather then enroll her in a public school like those who have apparently suffered under capitalism and can’t afford it?
If capitalism is as evil as Moore would have us believe, where does he get off charging colleges upwards of $40,000 for a two-hour lecture? ($20,000/an hour? Not bad considering the U.S. is such an evil capitalist country.)
But all these fun facts go all the way back to 2005. How’s Michael Moore been faring under the oppressive capitalist system he so despises lately? Yesterday at Forbes, Elisabeth Eaves wrote about how he has been celebrating the film’s upcoming release:
The bars were sponsored by liquor companies, the kitchen by Lufthansa. One room had marble walls, another, cashmere. Hundreds of guests plucked hors d’oeuvres from Plexiglas trays, but when I reached for a passing tray of pigs in blankets, the waitress tried to stop me. “These are for Michael,” she said.
That would be Michael Moore, filmmaker, who was enthroned nearby on a crowded sofa nibbling from a skewer, which did seem less in harmony with his everyman sneakers and populist persona than a sausage wrapped in fried bread. The Monday night party in Manhattan, which spread over two luxurious penthouse suites, was sponsored by Esquire and tricked out with the magazine’s advertisers’ products. The guests were there to celebrate Moore’s latest movie, which had just had its New York premier uptown.
Capitalism, A Love Story, takes aim at nothing less than the whole capitalist system. It uses all the trademark Mooreisms familiar from earlier works like Bowling for Columbine and Fahrenheit 9/11: Stakeouts, clever editing and innuendo, with the extra-wide filmmaker himself shambling up to corporate headquarters as a self-declared representative of the people. In voice over, he calls capitalism “a system of taking and giving, mostly taking,” and he interviews two priests who call it evil. He praises socialism, and near the end of the film concludes of capitalism that “we have to replace it with something, and that something is called democracy.” […]
Oh boy. Nothing exposes the sheer ignorance of Michael Moore and his Hollywood and Manhattanite liberati guests better than that statement. They can all use a lesson from the brilliant scholar Walter E. Williams (and I’d bet he wouldn’t even charge $40,000 for his tutorial!) At today’s Jewish World Review Williams explains:
If one ranked countries according to whether they were closer to the capitalistic end of the spectrum or the socialistic or communistic end, then ranked countries according to per capita GDP and finally rank countries according to Freedom House’s “Map of Freedom in the World,” he would find a pattern that is by no means a coincidence. The people in those countries closer to the capitalist end of the economic spectrum have far greater income and enjoy greater human rights protections than those toward the socialist and communist end. […]
… If you chose the United States, you’d find that according to the government surveys, the typical “poor” American has cable or satellite TV, two color TVs, and a DVD player or VCR. He has air conditioning, a car, a microwave, a refrigerator, a stove, and a clothes washer and dryer, and whether he has health insurance or not, he is able to obtain medical care when needed. Try to find that in Cuba, Russia, China or North Korea. If we buy into the nonsense of Moore’s priests, the world’s poor people are incredibly stupid. Whether fleeing legally or illegally, their destination country is likely to be closer to capitalism than their departure country.
Time and time again history shows that despots of the world deprive their citizenry of freedom and democracy first by seizing their ability to become financially self-reliant. This includes greater government control of an individual’s private property, which subsumes earned income (via taxation and regulation). Indeed, in his indispensible book Liberty and Tyranny Mark Levin writes:
In the civil society, private property and liberty are inseparable. The individual’s right to live freely and safely and pursue happiness includes the right to acquire and possess property, which represents the fruits of his own intellectual and/or physical labor. As the individual’s time on earth is finite, so, too, is his labor. The illegitimate denial or diminution of his private property enslaves him to another and denies him his liberty.
In other words, capitalism is freedom; freedom is capitalism. Michael Moore and his liberal eltist Hollywood and Manhattanite sycophants are the actual embodiment of that fact. Can they really be so lacking in self-awareness as not to see what is so blatantly clear?
I surmise Michael Moore’s new film will no doubt push the meme repeated by John Kerry and John Edwards and countless other liberal/Democrat demagogues that, due to the unfairness of America’s capitalist system “the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.” Problem with that statement is that it erroneously assumes that the “rich” who got richer were the same pool of people and the “poor” who got poorer were also the same pool of people. But, precisely due to the capitalist system, millions of Americans classified as “poor,” in 5, 10, 15 years move upward to the rich or even “richer” category. Members of socialist or communist societies simply do not enjoy this sort of upward mobility.
That’s why millions of immigrants came to this country for over two centuries literally without two nickels to rub together, and within a decade or so can afford sending their children to college. It’s the capitalist system that allows that to happen.
The Forbes article continues:
The film tries to show that capitalism brought about the housing crisis, the recession, decaying cities and unemployment, and the bailout of financial firms at the expense of the middle class. At the end, Moore exhorts the audience to help him defeat the system, saying “please, speed it up.”
Again, complete ignorance of the facts. First of all, despite what the Michael Moores, Barney Franks, and Barack Obamas of this nation say, it was government regulation and intervention with the free market that caused the financial crisis. In the above-cited JWR article, Walter Williams continues:
Most of our country’s serious problems can be laid at the feet of Congress and the White House and not at capitalism. Take the financial crisis. One-third of the $15 trillion of mortgages in existence in 2008 are owned, or securitized by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Ginnie Mae, the Federal Housing and the Veterans Administration. Banks didn’t mind making risky loans and Wall Street buyers didn’t mind buying these repackaged loans because they assumed that they would be guaranteed by the federal government: read bailout by taxpayers. Under a capitalist system, financial institutions would not have been intimidated or encouraged into making risky loans and neither would they have been bailed out if they did so.
Second, it would blow a crater-sized hole in Moore’s whole theory to acknowledge that decaying cities and unemployment, and to some extent the housing crisis and recession, were not the result of capitalism, but rather the natural result of decades of oppressive tax hikes and stifling regulations courtesy of big-government, capitalism-hating leftist Democrats!
Don’t believe me? Consider these recent statistics [h/t Nanny State News]:
Top 10 American Cities With the Highest Poverty Rate by
Rank, City, State, and % People Below Poverty Level
1. Detroit, MI 32.5%
2. Buffalo, NY 29.9%
3. Cincinnati, OH 27.8%
4. Cleveland, OH 27.0%
5. Miami, FL 26.9%
5. St. Louis, MO 26.8%
7. El Paso, TX 26.4%
8. Milwaukee, WI 26.2%
9. Philadelphia, PA 25.1%
10. Newark, NJ 24.2%
(U.S. Census Bureau, 2006 American Community Survey, August 2007)History of City Mayors of those Top 10 Poorest Cities:
Detroit: Since 1962 every mayor of Detroit has been a liberal progressive democrat
Buffalo: Since 1962 every mayor of Buffalo has been a liberal progressive democrat
Cincinnati: Since 1962, there has been only 3 Republican Mayors, but 10 liberal progressive democrat Mayors the last one 30 years ago.
Cleveland: Since 1942, there have been 2 Republican Mayors but 9 liberal progressive democrat Mayors
Miami: Since 1957, there have been 1 Republican and 1 Independent Mayor and 10 liberal progressive democrat Mayors
St Louis: Since 1949 there has been nothing but liberal progressive democrat Mayors in St Louis. 9 to be exact.
El Paso: The last Republican Mayor of El Paso was 1889 Every one since has been a democrat then a liberal progressive democrat
Milwaukee: Since 1960, Milwaukee has had 4 Mayors, all liberal progressive democrat
Philadelphia: Since 1952 Philadelphia has had nothing but liberal progressive democrat mayors, all 9 of them.
Newark: Since 1953, Newark has had nothing but 5 liberal progressive democrat Mayors.
Bottom line: Every city torn apart by crime, poverty, and misery is the result of anti-capitalist Democrat governance.
Undoubtedly and unsurprisingly, Capitalism: A Love Story is going to make Michael Moore significantly wealthier than he is even now. But even more sadly is that, just as with his previous movies, viewers are going to exit the theater completely misinformed about the economic system which has made the country in which they reside the most prosperous and envied in human history. This will, of course, lead and grossly ignorant voters at the ballot box voting for equally ignorant Marxist-socialist demogogues (like our current president) who will continue to destroy our economy and then blame capitalism for it.
There’s a reason why El Rushbo often says that ignorance is our nation’s most expensive commodity.
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