Moore managed to find a quotation of Benjamin Franklin seeming to encourage people who worked hard for a living to give up everything they don’t need for the moment to people who never did a stitch of work. However, anyone familiar with American values in general and with Benjamin Franklin’s literary work and general work ethic in particular knows that for every proverb Franklin may have composed implying a person should not save what he or she earned, there are probably a dozen proverbs of his supporting the principle he also set forth that “G-d helps those that help themselves.”
The movie also does well to show that even a “socialist” like the multi-million dollar and major stockholder Michael Moore feels that the American Constitution is a worthy document. However, another quotation of Benjamin Franklin that Moore apparently failed to quote is that “The Constitution only gives people the right to pursue happiness. You have to catch it yourself.” The Founding Fathers favored liberty; not the tyranny of government controls over which lives are to be saved by limited medical resources, and the forced unionization without a secret ballot enabling people to support the viability of their jobs rather than the ruin of their employers.
The movie presents the second Bill of Rights proposed by Franklin D. Roosevelt, but even the movie concedes that this bill was never enacted, in large measure because freedoms come at a price, and if you can’t pay the bills, you aren’t free to reap the benefits. Only capitalism enables the people to have enough freedom and to generate enough money to pay for the pursuit of good health and happiness on the highest levels. The countries in Europe that boast a high standard of living are only able to maintain it to the extent that they do because they do not have to shoulder the responsibilities of the United States that protects its own citizens and the whole free world, to a great extent, with the greatest military force in the world, and that helps to feed and bail out most of the third world countries, almost singlehandedly, as well as by being the primary bankroller of the United Nations. Furthermore, most European countries do not have such a high percentage of legal and illegal immigrants and citizens accustomed to institutionalized cross-generational welfare and other subsidies at the public expense.
When it comes to socialized medicine, it may be noted that the life expectancy of people in the United States is not the highest in the world, not because the United States doesn’t have the greatest health care system in the world, but in large measure because the United States is a victim of its own success, with more cars and therefore more car accidents than any other country, with more rich artery-hardening food available to more people than in any other country, with more deaths in wars defending its own freedom and the freedoms of people in many other countries, with more victims of terrorism than most countries have, and for many other reasons, not the least of which is that much of its medical resources are devoted to illegal immigrants, who get more and better health care in prison than out of it, and whose disproportionate populations in U.S. prisons adds to the death rate in our country (primarily before they were incarcerated). In addition, many of them have a language barrier, aided and abetted by costly bilingual programs, which may help prevent many of them from finding out the best ways to preserve their own health. In addition, many of our medical resources are also diverted to the most sophisticated medical care for foreigners who pay top dollar to travel to America from all over the world for surgical procedures and medical care they cannot hope to get anywhere else. (Further points on this subject appear in my article in the Canada Free Press entitled “
Proponents of Universal Health care: Undermining Quality Health Care, War on Terror, U.S. Economy,” October 29, 2008.)
The movie even tries to co-opt Jesus into saying that he would not support medical care for pre-existing conditions, to try to show satirically that socialized medicine is somehow a Christian concept. However, the fact is that it is precisely the Judeo-Christian ethic that would have people provide tithes and voluntarily help the poor and the infirm so that they would have no need of reliance on a secular government.
The movie somehow extols President Obama as an agent for change from Capitalism to Socialism without spelling out the fact that many of the people he appointed to lead his revolution are the same people he claims symbolize the greed of President Bush and his advisors, from Goldman Sachs in general, to Timothy Geitner in particular, and many of the Democrats who are supposedly part of the Obama revolution include such politicians as Chris Dodd and Barney Frank, who helped to create the economic crisis in the course of decades in Congress which they convinced many people that President Bush was responsible for even though President Bush was only in office for less than a decade, and the economy was doing very well under President Bush for his first 6 years until the Democrats wrested control of Congress and brought the country to its knees in the two years that followed. Moore also only seems to focus on the Bush bailout without mentioning that Obama’s bailouts have been even more expensive and indefensible, riddled with paybacks to the people who got him elected, no matter how corrupt and unproductive, as well as unprecedented support to prop up the bastions of capitalism that Moore and Obama claim to be so intent on changing.
Ironically, despite the traditional cheap shots against President Bush and Vice President Cheney that Moore routinely stoops to for cheap laughs, Moore actually quotes Bush in eloquent defenses of capitalism, and credits him for being clever enough to manipulate Congress and the country at will, even though Moore tries to portray President Bush as stupid, a charge that rings hollow in light of Bush’s achievements and down-to-earth defenses of traditional American values and actions that will undoubtedly be appreciated by future historians despite the distortions of the current press, comedians, and misinformed Americans. President George W. Bush, incidentally, is the only U.S. president with degrees from Harvard and Yale! (A person can get in based on pedigree, but can’t get out with a degree on contacts alone.)
Even were Moore to be correct that President Bush is personally responsible for capitalism’s less than finest hours, particularly in his last year in office, that is far from proving that capitalism was a failure under all the prior presidents and their administrations, let alone under President Obama who seeks to change the greatest country in the world, who claims not to be a socialist, and whose appointments to lead the economy of our great country have been so similar to the appointments of his predecessors with one notable distinction – Obama’s appointments have been notorious for their tax evasion showing personal greed at its most extreme, as opposed to the appointments of Obama’s predecessors who at least funneled money, by and large, into the great corporations and financial institutions that gave all classes of Americans their jobs, profit-sharing accounts, money market funds, and pensions.
Moore only describes the greed of certain corporations and investment firms that served our country so well for most of its years, without describing the corruption of organizations like Obama’s Acorn that pressured banks into lending so much money to people in no position to repay them, which in large measure triggered the economic downturn in which our country continues to find itself. Moore describes the plight of the disabled, while then showing how evicted “disabled” people could lift huge and heavy objects with ease and throw them into garbage dumps, unwittingly revealing how a great part of the problems facing capitalism today is the socialistic inroads of corruption encouraging many able-bodied people to receive disability and other benefits at the expense of people who are truly sick and disabled as well as all hard-working Americans working toward the American capitalist dream.
The fact is that people have given up their Motherland and their careers in communist Russia and risked their lives in life boats coming from socialist Cuba in order to join people from socialist and other countries throughout the world who wished to live the American dream, whether as legal immigrants or even as illegal immigrants who find life as illegals in hiding better than as full citizens in their socialist and communist countries of origin. People from countries with socialized medicine flock to the United States for the most sophisticated and prompt medical care in the world. If Americans would go to socialist countries for medical treatment, it would be akin to “man bites dog” and the hand that feeds him.
Sure capitalism isn’t perfect. But “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” If it IS broken, fix it; eliminate abuses in the system; come up with creative ideas to improve it; vote for slates on Boards of Directors committed to keeping executive salaries reasonable; but exchanging a Cadillac with a flat tire for a shiny new bicycle – let alone a beat-up old bicycle -- makes about as much sense as closing down Guantanamo Bay, one of the most luxurious state-of-the-art prisons in the world, instead of just eliminating allegedly abusive practices. Moore is too devious, cowardly, and/or hypocritical to openly say that the alternative to capitalism is socialism, so he says that the alternative to capitalism is democracy. Somehow or other, even capitalism under George Bush – who presided over its worst hour since before World War II (without conceding fault) – was far more democratic than the socialism of Stalin or Hitler when capitalism was at its worst point in modern times. The Jews in Hitler’s concentration camps somehow did not exactly have an opportunity to vote based on their numbers but they were obliged to have numbers tattooed on their arms before they were exterminated and incinerated. The people in Stalin’s gulags didn’t exactly get to vote on their fates or have smiles on their faces before they froze to death. Democracy may not always produce the best results, but it generally sure beats the alternatives, and true democracy clearly flourishes under capitalism more than it does under socialism or communism, even according to such politically incorrect but relatively enlightened liberal commentators as Bill Maher.
As for the basic premise of classic socialism, the classic flaw is that if all people receive equal rewards no matter how much they know or do, or do not know or do not do, human nature is such that very few people will take the trouble to reach for the stars, or at least for their potential. If people with special talents are coerced into developing them in their vocational and/or avocational lives, even if they do not want to dedicate their lives to doing so, then it won’t be long before many if not most people will not be following their passions and will be deprived of their liberty to follow their dreams, thereby leading miserable lives, and not likely to live up to their potential either. If everyone had to sacrifice his or her personal positive impulses for the way to spend their lives for the good of the whole, it may not be too long before certain people, especially if they are elderly or otherwise not in the good graces of President Obama and his appointees, and other presidents and government officials yet unborn, and perhaps unelected as well, will have to give up their places in line for needed organs for transplantation, and eventually before they will be called upon to sacrifice spare kidneys on demand, or other less expendable organs for the common good. All of these seemingly outrageous scenarios have already happened in some societies, most notably and by no coincidence, socialist ones and dictatorships in which people do not benefit from the freedoms of capitalist societies.
One of the early scenes of the movie featured the statement that American citizens are either very rich or very poor (with no middle class), and the movie supports this preposterous lie by citing the statistic that 1% of Americans earn as much as 95% of the other Americans, conveniently neglecting to explain that these statistics factor in the earnings of corporations that benefit the middle class in ways outlined above, and this statistic fails to be placed in the context that the proportion of income taxes paid by the wealthiest Americans is lopsided as well, and that the poorest Americans do not even pay any income tax while many of them receive more services and benefits than many of the richest Americans. If it were true that Americans today are either very rich or very poor (with no middle class), why would there be such a fuss about the losses in 401(k) and other pension plans, profit-sharing accounts, and money market funds during this past year by so many rank-and-file middle class Americans? Most Americans had a lot to lose, but still have a lot left to invest – even more than what they lost -- most notably their energies and talents when given the freedom to be channeled and to be rooted in the routes of their preferences. Michael Moore is one of the millions of Americans benefiting from the American dream. His manipulative and misleading movies have catapulted him into the top fraction of that “evil” 1% without his having shared his bounty as a socialist who is not a hypocrite would. One only hopes he would stop making so many films that made him rich and famous beyond his wildest dreams, while portraying the country that gave him everything as one big nightmare.
Aaron I. Reichel, Esq., is a member of the federal and state bars in New York and New Jersey. His most recent book is Fahrenheit 9-12, a Rebuttal to Fahrenheit 9/11.
Even the worst movies can have some redeeming qualities, and Michael Moore’s latest venture into sarcastic distortions and unquestionable hypocrisy is no exception. Let us begin with what may have been the generally tedious movie’s best quality, its epilogue quoting one of the most creative and productive Americans who ever lived, Benjamin Franklin.
