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Give Me Ten Dollars and I'll Tell You Why Capitalism is Evil

Posted: 23 Sep 2009 07:33 PM PDT

The advance promotion and interviews for Michael Moore's latest
agitprop movie, Capitalism: A Love Story are well underway. The message of
the movie, produced and distributed by the millionaire capitalists at
Paramount, the Weinstein Company and TCI cable company spinoff Overture
Films has as its message, what else but the evils of capitalism.
Capitalism you see is bad, except when it's good.

The Weinstein Company, the production company behind
Capitalism: A Love Story, does have its reasons to be down on capitalism.
After leaving behind Miramax, the company they sold for a cool 70 million
to Disney, the Weinstein Company has not been faring too well in the free
market. Capitalism requires actually getting people to give you money in
exchange for your products and services. And the Weinstein Company's
biggest success up until this year was another Michael Moore screed
against free market health care, Sicko. Now the Weinsteins are hoping to
cash in with Capitalism: A Love Story in order to bring in new investors
so that their company can continue its capitalistic existence.

It's
of course easy enough to point out the irony of millionaire businessmen
and entertainers preaching against capitalism as if they were radicals
squatting in abandoned basements, not living in Moore's Upper West Side
Manhattan apartment. And Michael Moore climbing up on his high horse to
contend that "Capitalism is evil" and that it has to be replaced, is
particularly ironic when you consider the message comes from a man who
made millions hypocritically preaching slogans just like that to college
students, while using
the money to build up a portfolio of Haliburton, pharmaceutical,
defense and oil company stocks.

What is particularly wonderful
about Michael Moore's portfolio is that there is hardly a corporate field
that he hasn't inveighed against... and invested in; thus letting him make
money from condemning defense companies, Haliburton and the pharmaceutical
industry, and earn money from investing in them at the same time. In the
corporate world this sort of thing used to be called, synergy. Michael
Moore can rant about the evils of war, free market health care and oil
companies... and then invest the millions made from box office and book
sales into those same companies. Because Michael Moore in the end is one
thing above all else, a capitalist.

When Michael Moore shouts that
the wealthy want all our money, he does know what he's talking about.
After all the writers who worked on his TV show have gone
into detail about how Michael Moore tried to deny them Writer's Guild
standing and residuals, demonstrating that Moore put all his research into
union busting to good use in the office. But that is par for the course
for Moore, who denounces the rich for making money, sending their
children to private schools and oppressing the workers-- only to make
money, send his own children to private school and oppress his own
workers.

When Michael Moore travels around the world with
a team of bodyguards delivering paid lectures on the
evils of making money,the obvious question becomes, is Michael Moore a
self-hating capitalist or a hypocrite? The answer, like most of the left,
is a little of both.

The left's anti-capitalist rhetoric after all
is based on capitalism. Can anyone imagine the modern left without
Woodstock, the Ford Foundation or George Soros? When you shove aside the
populist distractions the roots of the left are just as corporate as
anyone. Even the Communist Part of the United States has its investments
and stock portfolios. And as the Obama Administration's corruption reminds
us, the left is certainly not a non-profit organization.

It's
possible to debate whether or not Al Gore believes in his own global
warming alarmism, but he certainly doesn't live it. Instead his lifestyle
of jet plane trips around the world and his hefty mansion are just the tip
of the iceberg of a huge fortune, most of it made from turning his global
warming cause into corporate bucks, Cap and Trade is the very embodiment
of how the left fuses anti-capitalism with capitalism, making money
trading futures created by penalizing people and companies who produce
carbon emissions.

Similarly Michael Moore
may talk about "dividing the pie equally", but his
actual charitable contributions have been scant at best. And Michael
Moore isn't about to share the proceeds of his films alike with the
editors, grips and staffers and hundreds of other people involved in
bringing his movies to theaters. Instead Moore pocketed half the gross for
Sicko himself, in an upfront deal worthy of a true capitalist. And it's
safe to assume that he has just as good a deal this time around, or an
even better deal, in which he stages scenes with sympathetic or
unsympathetic people, ladles the carefully edited result out for the
public at 10 dollars a head, and pockets the profits.

Capitalism: A
Love Story will be making money for Moore, the Weinsteins, John Malone of
Liberty Media's Overture Films (who ironically enough sits on the board of
the meta-capitalist Cato Institute) and Paramount's executives and
stockholders. It will make that money by selling anti-capitalist
sloganeering to leftists, college students and people too stupid to know
any better... by a man who plays a radical on the big screen, and a
traditional bloodsucking profiteer off it.

But the underlying story behind Capitalism: A Love
Story is about far more than Wall Street, it's about the way that the left
profits from slamming capitalism. Moore, like his former employer Ralph
Nader, follows in the great tradition of demagogues who rise to fame by
claiming to stand up for "the little guy". For the left such demagoguery
can be a reliable way of making money while retaining their radical cred.
And even more so for the left, anti-capitalist regulations is a get rich
scheme for lawyers, bureaucrats and their corporate friends, who are
always ready to hitch something like Cap and Trade to the anti-capitalist
wagon.

Michael Moore's form of capitalism is Leftonomics, in which
money is made not from success, but from denouncing the success of others.
Moore is the court jester of the Democratic party, acting out a working
class charade in a party of limousine liberals insecure about their own
wealth, providing the propaganda tools to connect their agenda with the
manufactured working class outrage peddled by a grotesquely obese
millionaire, who without the flannel and lazy grooming could easily pose
for the moneybags toting capitalist villain of a 19th century socialist
cartoon. And the cause he agitates for, government regulation and
centralization, continues the process his career has been built on, taking
from the sons and daughters of the middle class to give to the progressive
rich. Capitalism you see is bad, except when it's good for enriching the
left.