Capitalism: Not Just for the Rich Anymore

Michael Moore's latest movie, Capitalism: A Love Story, tries to link foreclosed homes, underpaid pilots, judges sending kids to juvie hall in exchange for payoffs, and dead workers whose employers collected on life insurance. It's a package meant to indict private property and free markets as, in the words of a priest interviewed in the film, "contrary to all that's good."

Moore doesn't notice that two of his framing anecdotes—man doesn't pay debt on house and has it occupied by bank, business doesn't pay wages it owes and has factory occupied by workers—are the same in justice and logic. His real point is that people richer than you (not than him, necessarily) must be punished, somehow.

He loses his whole game when he asks a woman from the factory why the workers don't form a co-op and run it themselves. They don't have money, she explains; they aren't capitalists. That's a benefit the wealthy provide to the working man that Moore won't acknowledge.