New film: Michael Moore v capitalism

False profits or false prophet?

Another tendentious take-down from the showman

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Readers' comments



Jumped into a book that Mr Moore wrote once. He poured scorn on the musical talent of Seals & Crofts and all who listened to their music.

I kind of like their Summer Breeze and King of Nothing. Chill out tunes. Haven’t much read or watched anything of Mr Moore’s since – life is too short – but was prepared to read what the Economist thought of his work.


Riph: so you would rather be poor as long as someone else is poorer than you? Your argument that developing countries are worse off than the U.S. seems to suggest that you conceptualize progress a finite good. I differ. Progress does not have to be finite such that my progress reduces yours--we can all progress. Economic development does not have to be a zero sum game: it can, and should be positive sum.

It is a shame that you would use the "waistline" as a measure of economic progress. Being fat/obese does not necessarily indicate wealth. Some of the people in Africa or Asia that you lampoon as having small waistlines could be as rich as anyone else in the more developed countries.


I saw M Moore's movie two days ago and may see it again soon. Here in upper middle class areas of California, M Moore films are assumed to be bad by most. My liberal friends and family appreciate his films and they are not dummies.
I have been mad as hell about the bailout of Wall Street by the Fed and Congress. I have yet to read or hear anyone explain Derivative Trading. That includes the Fed chairmans, Treasury Secretaries, Wall Street Bankers, and members of Congress. I would suggest that super computers be outlawed in real time trading.

M Moore missed the fact that when speculation on Wall Street goes out of control, the economy almost always ends up in a depression. The very rich get super rich during these times. When will this stop?


Michael Moore has been brave and outspoken for the last 8 years of the GWB nightmare. He has therefore been far more useful as a journalist than the rest of the media put together. Only the Comedy Channel (J.Stewart) and Rolling Stone could call themselves journalists, as well as MM.This rather bizarre list, just goes to show where the rest,including I am afraid, most of the time, your magazine, has been -AWOL to their duties. So MM may be whatever you say he is, but since his subject is the US, the richest, the est of the est, all criticisms are fair. Too little good has been done.Too little accomplished.Wealth too unfairly distributed. People too easily satisfied by paltry accomplishments, given their resources. And what has gone on, on Wall Street has nothing to do with capitalism, and a lot to do with premeditated, organised fraud with the support of a bought and paid for government.


i do not subsribe your point of view about Mr Michael Moore
of course he is neither an economist nor a banker but I think his critic is most valuable even if it lacks the pars construents as you correctly point out
anyway I graduated in economics (what's all that mathematics for ?) than I worked in a big bank (any use of economic science ?) and what I am sure now that I am very old is that only greed and dishonesty leads the bosses so we need Mr Moore just to remember that (I presume you already knew, someone not yet)


I find it amusing that Moore blasts capitalism; without capitalism, nobody would know of Moore. Without capitalism, Moore would be a lonely street beggar prone to frequent Tourrette's like outbursts.

Truth is Moore is living large (no pun intended); he has an investment portfolio similar to those of America's top CEO's. His website hawks books, ad space, memberships, etc.

Who's the capitalist???


The subject of this movie makes it harder to propose alternative systems because the world is a capitalist society. On the issues of gun control or heathcare, Mr. Moore can more easily turn to other systems and suggest them instead. However, let's not write off his entire film because it doesn't propose a suitable alternative--has anyone been able to do that? Mr. Moore is not an academic; he is a filmmaker, and a damn good one. He manages to make film after film on different issues (albeit with a similar formula) and they're all entertaining. I'll stick to written media for my brilliant ideas. I'm not expecting the next Karl Marx of the world to be a fat American filmmaker, but I do expect my fat American filmmakers to churn out entertaining and thought provoking films--Michael Moore does just that and he should be praised for it.

Also, as to your comment that Mr. Moore doesn't depict a middle class, I'd like to use a recent Economist chart to suggest that he's exactly right.

If 10% of Americans have ZERO income and 1% have 25% of the country's there really a middle class?


That review tells us more about the economists biases than about Moores, which was kind of hard to achieve with such an easy fact light populist target as Moore.

As best example that
" in a novel reading of Detroit’s woes, corporate bosses who drove their companies into the ground because of, not in spite of, their determination to slim down their operations and break the power of the unions."

No novel reading at all. Rather the most common reading ....

pseudo libertus

Although there is no such thing as a completely unregulated market, except perhaps in places such as Somalia, the US's relatively deregulated variety is ulmitately part of the same socio-political culture than allows Moore the freedom to pursue and profit from making polemicals like this, exposing him to the charge of hypocrisy.

Perhaps some enterprising producer will make a film about Moore and uncover his complicity in the 9/11 plot, the credit crisis and the supersizing of the US to provide material for his mill to grist?


Someone should make a movie entitled "Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists: A Love Story". Corruption and moral hazard would be the central theme. Does anyone really believe Paulson, a former CEO of Goldman Sachs, had nothing to do with there being no conditions on the bailout of AIG so that it could pay Goldman Sachs 100% on the dollar in counter party obligations. It would worth finding out exactly to what extent his detesting of the Lehmann Brother's CEO and the its role as a competitor of Goldman Sachs influenced the fateful decision of the Fed and Treasury to sit on their hands while Lehmann twisted in the wind that final weekend. The gaming of the regulators and all of the political arm twisting has the making of a first rate thriller. At the end of the day, the exponential rise in CEO salaries and the obscenely disproportionate distribution of wealth of those in the top 5% vs everyone else is of course non-sustainable. Get Michael Lewis to write it since he has lots of the inside dirt. Regardless of your political orientation, everyone wants some kind of "tell all" catharsis before we can move on and make the necessary changes.

Simon Adebesi

I was talking to someone the other day who made an interesting observation, which Suo Marte’s remarks reminded me of: the last 12 months have are said to have been a disaster for free market capitalism, but how can that be when they are so patently not free?

The system that has been casually labelled “free market capitalism” might be better described as “bubble inflating capitalism”. When the market goes up 20% it is called a good year, but does not raise eyebrows. When it happens many years in succession it is called a bull market and those credited with facilitating it are praised. But when the market loses 20% in a year it is called a catastrophe that brings the system to its knees. The system is inherently unstable. And that is why those that challenge the consensus view, especially those that put their money where their mouths are and short sell, are treated with utmost suspicion. In essence, for our system to work, perhaps we must accept that some periods of relative hardship are inevitable, and constantly cutting rates to keep driving endless growth is inherently damaging.

Therefore, the outsiders’ view of “wall street types” or more accurately financiers generally as a homogenous group is very misleading. To continue the theme of these comments, it is overly simplistic. But then unless someone wants to write a series of very detailed books on this, things are necessarily simplistic. A brief article in The Economist must be simplistic as a review of a film, just as must a feature length film must be in coverage of a political and economic system.

I haven’t seen this film yet but I certainly will. I like Michael Moore but I agree with the posters above that he argues from a very biased position. The people on the other side of the debate would do well to make their case a little better. Michael Moore will always be the man who made Fahrenheit 9/11 and for that I will always hold him in some esteem. But I suspect that with this film he may have bitten off more than he can chew, and the subject may be a little too complex for it to be done justice by his own brand of reporting.


This is a very black and white review. Really, you cannot see a single point in the entire movie? I mean, you're doing exactly what you're accusing him of doing. You'd have far more credibility if you took the time to explain where he's right and where he's wrong. It's simplistic to be so broadly dismissive.

Paul Marks

The government (not "capitalism") caused the present crises, both in general terms - via the vast increase in the money supply by the Federal Reserve over years (see Thomas Woods "Meltdown" and the works he cites - which also deal with the problem of fractional reserve banking) and the particular nature of the present crises - the housing market (see Thomas Sowell's "Housing: Boom and Bust" for the policies and regulations that directed the credit money into the housing market).

Almost needless to say the government's reaction to the crises (panic measures to subsidize everyone in sight and to reinflate the houseing and other bubbles) will end in total collapse - and the Economist (along with the rest of the establishment) bares responsbility for this comming collapse.

It is your distorted corporate welfare vision that opens the door to socialists like Mr Moore (see F. Bastiat for an extended examination of the ideology the Economist now supports).

Sam Ber

I thought it is the US government that, upon request, has corrected, or has been trying to correct, the latest excess.


it's funny some of the friends I know that are huge michael moore fans and have watched sicko, god maybe 10 times. Are totally unaffected by his latest shenanigans. I don't think his films have gotten worse really, its generally the same agit-prop its always been. I think maybe he just loonied up his premise a little too far.


While I don't always disagree with Michael Moore, he is very good at showing a very one-sided view of an issue. Frankly, I think if he hates everything about America so much and can only see the "evil" it does, then he's free to go live somewhere else at any time.

suo Marte

while I share Michael Moore’s outrage over our current economic crisis, i’m surprised this film is called, Capitalism: A Love Story.

the US has not been capitalist for at least 75 years.

the word "capitalism” has been around since at least 1753, but it didn’t take root as a description of an economic system until it was used in some Thackeray novel or another, in the mid 19th century.

back then, capitalism was defined as the private control of the resource inputs employed to produce goods & services. it was a term used to describe how entrepreneurial labor applied financial capital to a combination of land, labor and equipment to create products & services, as well as to determine the amount of output from these products & services, using prices agreed to by individual market participants - WITHOUT Govt intervention.

yes, there’s debate as to when precisely capitalism died in the US. but most agree it began w/ the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890. followed by the 16th Amendment authorizing income taxes in 1913 and then quickly followed by the Federal Reserve Act, also in 1913, which established Govt’s monopoly (the FED) on the US money supply & the setting of key interest rates. and all this culminated in the 1935 Wagner Act which forces employers to negotiate w/ unions. and then of course there’s the price distortion caused by all these Govt programs; Medicare, Medicaid & Medicaid Part D; state & federal limits on competition across state lines; the forced misallocation of resource from fiscal stimulus; the Government Sponsored Enterprises (GSEs); and on and on.

economists call this muddle a “mixed economy” within which mostly Govt determines the price of these factors of production using all the tricks listed above.

i’m surprised Moore spends time attacking the EFFECTS of our mixed economy. if it were me, i would have raged against the CAUSES of our mixed economy, in general – all these Govt interventions -- and also against the root cause of our current crisis, specifically – the FED.

throughout the movie, i wondered: is Michael Moore really as ignorant as this film suggests?

not once did I hear him acknowledge that the FED’s “too loose too long” fed funds rate errors between 2000-06 caused our current crisis.

Moore could have used that May 6th clip of Geithner on the Charlie Rose Show in which Geithner not only admitted this fact, but he also acknowledged the FED’s liquidity injection when straight into US real estate! i was disappointed not to see this…

and i was equally disappointed NOT to see a clip of Bernanke’s confession on 60 Minutes this past March in which he admitted the FED caused the Great Depression, too. that would have been sweet, indeed!

i left the theater doubting i’d ever understand WHY a rich guy like Michael Moore -- who owes his fortune to capitalism (thanks to very little Govt intervention in the film industry) -- blames capitalism for Govt’s failure, unless of course Moore is simply ignorant or more likely, motivated by greed.


I'm surprised at the simplistic attacks on Mr. Moore (often for his simplistic attacks) in this forum. There is more than sound and fury to Mr. Moore's movies.

His movies tell a truth - just not the whole truth. He articulates an important and valid perspective on the American experience. He is not making a journalistic documentary setting out two sides of an issue, he is a pamphleteer arguing one side very well - and his harshest critics seem to be irritated they have nobody articulating their world view as entertainly as the WSJ (also probably oversimplistic - but in the opposite Ayn-Rand-type nonsense direction).

The Economist reviewer said it best: Mr. Moore's world is black and white extremes. This is true - any picture of reality must have blacks and whites. Greys too.


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