Moore likes Capitalism

Moore slightly misrepresented himself in this film. Because of Moore's known use of smart ass comedy (which is funny and he does this well by the way) and anti-a-lot of things personality, viewers get the impression he hates capitalism. Truthfully Moore doesn't hate capitalism. What he hates is a certain type of capitalism, the type of capitalism that promotes deregulation and minimalist taxes to favor the rich elite to the point where society starts to crumble because there is no money for infrastructure development (social security, affordable and decent education, healthcare, mass transit, etc) and white collar corruption takes over because there is nobody there to regulate (the Bush era?). What he shows us is that during periods in American history when the super wealthy were taxed at 90% of everything they made ABOVE a certain income ($400,000 in the Fifties . That's the key, NOT 90% of ALL they make, only above a cutoff point, which would be about $3 million now based on the consumer price index if you compare it to $400,000 in the Fifties ) we had surplus money for schools, pensions, social security, roads, the military, healthcare AND the rich got to still be rich, just not mega-mega rich. And nothing stopped them from trying to become more rich. In other words, the Laffer curve, which moronically states that after a certain tax level people have no incentive to make more money because the government takes most of it, isn't factual (like I said, the high taxes of the Fifties never stopped people from trying to make more money). Moore basically hates Reaganomics. That's his point. Not that we should develop planned markets, but we should let regulated and not deregulated capitalism develop (the difference between Keynesian economics and Reaganomics) and that taxes should be at levels where we will have surpluses to still invest in our country.

So what he wants, and I agree, is to strike a balance between where people can still pursue being rich and become rich (like he is), but up to the point where reducing their tax bracket doesn't affect nation building. Like it was under the New Deal and during the Fifties. Remember Adam Smith talked about the right to have infinite money, but only after certain variables were put into place and under a society that was moral and structured to function. One of the drawbacks in understanding economic policy is that people associate socialism with communism when in fact socialism is far more related to capitalism; just a type of capitalism where social institutions are designed to promote capitalistic trade at a national level (not an individual level).

In America now we have virtually no tax base and as we see our institutions are crumbling, all so 10% of the population can be mega rich instead of rich. The sad part is, these mega rich people wouldn't live any differently now than they would if they were just rich. The money gap between mega rich and rich is just a lump sum of cash in their bank accounts. If we returned taxes to what they were we'd get out of debt, have affordable education (did you know that we Americans owe $820 billion dollars in student loans?), and have all the things we used to have AND the rich could still live like they do. But we had Reaganomics shoved down our throats for 30 years and now we are seeing Reagan was dead wrong... and now we're paying for it.