Someone decided it would be a good idea to sit the Baron Harkonnen-ish Michael Moore in front of a camera and capture his gaseous emanations for posterity. The result was a cloud of stale socialism and self-righteous stank that Doug Powers, Bryan Preston, and Jonah Goldberg all treated the same way you’d treat the air in the mens’ room of a chili cook-off.
I don’t want to revisit the “what’s yours is mine, peasant” part of Moore’s quote, but a part that wasn’t included in the Real Clear Politics transcription. He won’t come off any more intelligently, but at least we can understand what would possess him to treat your bank account like the Give A Penny, Take A Penny bowl at his local Taco Bell. Here’s how he began his comments.
“First of all, we’re not broke. This country is not broke. The state of Wisconsin is not broke. There’s a ton of cash in this country — trillions of dollars of it. But it’s a finite amount. There is only so much cash, all right? What’s happened is, is we’ve allowed the vast majority of that cash to be concentrated in the hands of just a few people, and they’re not circulating that cash. If you don’t believe that, go try to get a loan right now.”
[Emphasis mine]
Yes, you read that correctly. According to Michael Moore, our economy can not grow, ever. Those GDP numbers we occasionally see — well the ones that don’t have minus signs in front of them that we used to see before Barack Obama took over — are illusory because there’s only so much money in this country and most of it is being hoarded away like copies of National Geographic in a crazy hermit’s walk-up apartment.
Remember, folks, this is the same guy who filmed an entire documentary about Capitalism. You would think that he would have learned a little something on the subject, even accidentally, but no. Michael Moore’s brain held fast against the real world and he came out knowing no more about how our economy works than he did when he started. That wasn’t by accident, by the way. Moore remains an economic dullard on purpose, because if he admitted that our economy does grow, his entire worldview will suddenly look ridiculous.
However, if you assume that wealth is finite, then socialism actually makes sense. Of course we’d want to make sure people weren’t hoarding the resources. Of course we’d want to make sure we spread it as evenly as we could. Of course we’d want to make sure that bloated gasbags don’t get so rich so rich they fairly dance when they talk about their wealth. If wealth is finite, then redistribution makes sense because that’s the only way poor people will ever get more of it.
But we know our economy doesn’t work that way. It grows. We create wealth. Well, normally, when our government isn’t choking the life out of our businesses and incomes, we create wealth. Poor people can become rich, not by seizing money from those with more, but by creating desirable goods and services that increase their wealth. This isn’t magic, by the way, but something that happens with such regularity and predictability that we’ve actually built an entire branch of science around it. We can observe wealth creation every day and subject it to experiment (such as the Keynesians in the Obama administration have been performing for the past two years, much to our detriment). Those upticks in GDP are living, breathing proof that Michael Moore doesn’t know any more about capitalism than he does about making a watchable movie.
Or perhaps he does and he just thinks he can play us all for fools.
Tags: Capitalism, Michael Moore, Nanny Fascism, Progressives, Socialism
