In Defense of Capitalism: a True Love Story

In the 1980s, in Soviet Russia, a few times a year, my class walked to a movie theater, where we were shown a documentary. Attendance was mandatory. The documentaries were different but the themes were the same: to the accompaniment of patriotic music, we learned about the righteousness of socialism, the greatness of Mother Russia, and the intelligence and foresight of our great leaders. To demonstrate how good we had it, we were shown images of “decaying” American capitalism. Of course, capitalism did not get the benefit of patriotic music as we were shown the poverty-stricken homeless, the KKK burning crosses and lynching blacks, and Russia-hating capitalists being poisoned by hamburgers (of course, later I learned this part about hamburgers was not a complete lie).

This weekend Americans will voluntarily spend millions of dollars to see a documentary by Michael Moore – Capitalism: the Love Story. But don’t kid yourself, this piece of work is not a documentary, it lacks objectivity and has no intention of seeking the truth, and it is anti-American and anti-capitalist propaganda. Mr. Moore is a talented propagandist; in Soviet Russia this documentary would have gotten him a medal and elevated him into a state hero.

A successful propaganda initiative has to have three elements: (1) to influence attitudes, instead of providing information, (2) to selectively present facts (i.e., lying by omission) to achieve a certain synthesis, and (3) to get an emotional rather than a rational response.

There is little information in this movie. Moore spends the bulk of the film going through our country’s trash and presenting it as the main course. For instance, a corrupt judge sentences innocent teenagers to spend months at a privately owned (i.e., for-profit, nongovernmental) youth-correction facility, while the judge is getting kickbacks from the facility owners. Moore interviews these poor teenagers, and we feel bad for them, as we should. We feel angry. Moore directs this anger towards capitalism (i.e., private enterprise): it is rotten and corrupt. Of course, the fact that corruption and bribery are the rare exception in the US, not the rule (as in Russia), is never mentioned.

Really, if you want to make a successful propaganda movie, you must evoke emotion and rightly or wrongly direct it at your subject of hate – in Moore’s case, capitalism. Moore shows families being evicted from their houses, in which some of them have lived for twenty years, and some of them have kids. Again, we feel bad for these people, we feel their pain, and we want to help. We are angry. That’s what Moore wants. But should we be angry at the bank that has given these people a loan? Or perhaps we should accept the fact that some people will make bad financial decisions, and they’ll pay a price. It is the easiest thing to blame a bank, or capitalism – they are not very popular today.

But let’s do the impossible, let’s humanize a bank. Let’s say you and I and a few friends put our life savings together and start a bank. We take deposits and make loans. Should we “forgive” a loan on a house to a person who overextended, made bad financial choices, or found himself facing hardship and unable to earn his way out of it? If we do enough of this “forgiving” we’ll go bankrupt, our kids won’t go to college, and we’ll need to ask someone else to “forgive” us for the loans on our houses, credit cards, etc. I am not even mentioning our depositors losing their money (and the FDIC – the taxpayer – bailing them out) and our employees losing their jobs.

So the heartless bank – you and I and a few friends – have to make a choice between sacrificing the well-being of our families for the sake of strangers. What would you do? See, this point is too rational and lacks the sensationalism of good propaganda; and thus Mr. Moore, who I am sure thought of it, omitted it.

Moore attacks BofA for not resorting to charity and not extending a loan to a factory in Michigan, even after BofA received TARP money. The same logic I just went through applies to the huge, unpopular BofA. Should BofA have thrown away money in a loan to the factory, knowing that the factory would not be able to repay it? Is this not what got us into the present problem in the first place?

Banks and Wall Street in general played a role in today’s crisis, but they were just one of many responsible players. Consumers in pursuit of keeping up with the Joneses overextended themselves (with the exception of cases of outright fraud, no one was forced to buy a bigger house). Rating agencies were getting paid by the customers they were rating. The Federal Reserve kept rates at very low levels for too long, politicians pressured lending at any cost, regulators were not regulating – and the list goes on. Vilifying banks as the only culprit is intellectually dishonest and a very myopic way to look at this complex problem, and Mr. Moore does just that!