Judith's language learning blog

I am back in Germany now, back on regular internet, so it’s time for a post. Today I would like to comment on the movie “Capitalism: A Love Story” by Michael Moore, which I watched the last night before leaving Atlanta.

Informative, biased

The movie left me with mixed feelings. Without doubt it was good to learn more about what happened to America since the beginning of the crisis in 2008, because I missed out on quite a bit of the news. The stories of the door & window factory, of the movement to move back into cleared houses, the various protests, all those either did not make the news in Germany or flew under the radar.

It’s not a secret that Michael Moore’s „documentary“ movies are supposed to do more than just inform people though. And that is where the problem starts. The movie “Sicko” proposed a clear alternative to the current American health care system: the European one. Without going into the details and pros and cons of either having the government run all health care as in some countries or just creating a public-run health insurance company to compete with the commercial ones as in others, Moore’s film set out to prove that the current American health care system needs reform and painted a glowing-but-not-incorrect picture of how things run in Western Europe.

What is your aim?

„Capitalism: A Love Story“ however does not have such an easy solution for a better America. There are many different solutions or ingredients proposed:

• some time before the 2nd world war (exact year unknown) when the USA had a 90% tax rate for the super-wealthy, along with universal health care, a good pension system and similar achievements that have since been lost
• the German / French / Italian / Japanese systems
• relying on politicians to combat this, and pressuring them if necessary
• demonstrations
• sit-down strikes
• squatting in houses
• winning over local law enforcement or sent-in law enforcement
• overthrowing the company management / the crooks at Wall Street and the corrupt politicians

The last one, especially in combination with Moore’s call to give government the right to seize assets „for the common good“ and the choice of L’Internationale (classic Communist rally song) in a watered-down translation for an ending music, made me shiver. It is not clear if Moore advocates Socialism in the sense of Communism or just Socialism in the sense of the Social Democratic parties of Europe, but if it’s not what he meant, he should have done more to distance himself from Communism.

Weak points

Also, his example of the company run by majority vote does not convince me. Even if the blue-collar workers have the same understanding of product management, marketing etc., not putting a spike into the wheels, there is still the matter of what happens if somebody needs to be hired, promoted or fired. This would almost certainly turn into a popularity contest – when did the best [singer / dancer / cook / businessman / ...] ever win a reality show by popular vote?

The example of the company where everybody, including the manager, earns the same salary, is less preposterous but also wouldn’t fly with me, because if somebody went to university, spending a lot more time and money on education before being able to start making money, it is natural that he should earn a higher wage, to make up for that expense. Anything else would mean that the surest way to get rich is to drop out of high school and start working as soon as possible.

How it works over here

Obviously I am biased, growing up and living in Germany, but I believe that German-style or French-style (or possibly Japanese-style) Social Democracy is the way to go. That is a capitalist democracy where everybody is still paid according to the amount of work he does, entrepreneurship is rewarded and companies are expected to pursue profit and nothing else, but the government keeps a check on them to prevent excesses. Excesses such laying off workers with barely a notice, withhelding wages, preventing them from forming unions, using coercion and threats, allowing banks to raise mortgage downpayments by 200% and the like. By the way, if families lost their home because of a foul play that should not have been possible, I’m all for letting them re-take it without ANY compensation to the banks. However, if they used the money to buy a new car and now can’t afford the normal downpayments, that’s their fault.

Another part of the government’s job according to Social Democracy is to ensure everybody, regardless of sex, age, opinions, education, ability or even willingness to work, will have health care, the chance to further their education and enough money to pay for rent and food and other basic needs (but he won’t have money to spare for anything beyond that if it’s his own fault he doesn’t have a job). It would be unbecoming of a first world nation to let anybody starve, no matter the reason he’s in that predicament. Germans pay tax rates that are significantly higher than what Americans pay, but it is with the understanding that this is all they need to do to guarantee a safety net for anybody who might fall on hard times, including foreigners who are living and working here. Germans are very reluctant to donate to local NPOs because of this understanding. You are much more likely to receive donations if you collect money for a literacy project in Africa than if you were to collect money for a literacy project in Germany.

Of course people are happy to take advantage of the safety net themselves [to the max, even if they wouldn't need it,] if they ever lose their job or fall ill – or for their education, since all education, including universities [in almost all parts of Germany] are free. If you studied at an American university, it is likely you have amassed tens of thousands of dollars, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars, of student debt because of the outrageous tuition fees. I estimate it would take me many years to pay the equivalent amount of money in taxes, and even then it would be in tiny everyday rates rather than one giant sum looming over me like Damocles’ sword. I’d say the system is already working for me.

Harnessing the energy

The safety net, along with the idea of the government as a supervisor and regulator of business, are what allow us to harness the energy that is capitalism and take advantage of it without falling prey to it. In my opinion, the root of America’s current problems is that people were expecting businesses and individuals to diverge from the profit motive, to give up the idea of making the largest possible profit in favour of morality. Most individuals are probably ready to do that, some to a greater extend than others, but there are some crooks who won’t. Companies are a lot less likely to do that, and the larger they are, the worse (though in the USA they tend to show more altruism than in Germany, probably because of the public’s exspectations). If you make an immoral but profit-raising decision at a large company, such as those health care industry workers looking for reasons to deny people the care they need in „Sicko“, or laying off lots of workers while your company is earning record-breaking amounts of money, you can often hide your shame in anonymity and quite possibly expect a raise in salary or promotion. It’s how the system works; all the incentives point that way. The profit motive will be second to none.

Moore, in this movie, appears to suggest that we should discard this motive as evil and base our economy on something else (A politbuero deciding what to produce? Coercion?). As far as I know, all substitutes have failed to provide even a small share of the mutual prosperity we can achieve through capitalism. It’s just a matter of figuring out the best way of preventing the pursuit of profit from crossing the boundaries of what is moral and just. Germany hasn’t found the perfect way yet either, as scandals can attest, but at this point in time it’s weathering the crisis better than the US, both from an economic and a human point of view.