
The Economist reviews Michael Moore's new film - MikeCapone
http://www.economist.com/books/displayStory.cfm?story_id=14585631
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btilly
My point of view is this.

Capitalism is the most effective way known of getting people to do what it
gets them to do. However you have no control of what that is.

Therefore if you want to have clean water supplies, universal education,
national defense, police, unproductive people not starving in the streets, etc
then you need to divert some resources away from capitalism. This is the
justification for taxation and government.

The justification for Michael Moore's point of view is that he wants to see
those things happen, and capitalism doesn't do that very well.

 _However_ be very careful about using government to try to direct capitalism
to meet your goals. Because well-meaning interventions regularly fail
spectacularly due to unintended consequences. One of which is that any
influential group that is regulated by government will try (and eventually
usually succeeds) in getting control over their regulators.

~~~
lionhearted
The problem is the word "capitalism" - it implies just for-profit enterprises.
But capitalism is really just how Marx branded "free enterprise."

> Therefore if you want to have clean water supplies, universal education,
> national defense, police, unproductive people not starving in the streets,
> etc then you need to divert some resources away from capitalism.

Capitalism - free enterprise - handles all of those pretty well except
national defense and maybe policing. Charities are part of capitalism.
Infrastructure's not so bad for government to build. In wealthy countries,
charities vastly outperform government in alms and welfare because it doesn't
create power structures that people try to hijack and lobby.

As for government in education, it corrupts education completely. Look at the
standard American middle school and high school curriculum - very little of
practically important things (scheduling, personal finance, establishing
habits, interpersonal skills, critical thinking, problem solving), and a lot
of nonsense. They teach algebra fairly well in American high school and almost
nothing else. I can't believe that any educator would be in favor of
government-run education: It sinks to a very low level, teachers are
handcuffed by bureaucrats and public opinion in their teaching methods, honest
perspectives on history, ethics, and civics become impossible to learn, bad
teachers don't get fired, good teachers with non-traditional backgrounds don't
get hired... like, government doing a lot of stuff is a relatively new idea,
and it's a nice idea, but it usually doesn't work so well in practice.

~~~
mkn
_As for government in education, it corrupts education completely. <snip>
[Government-run education] sinks to a very low level, teachers are handcuffed
by bureaucrats and public opinion in their teaching methods, honest
perspectives on history, ethics, and civics become impossible to learn, bad
teachers don't get fired, good teachers with non-traditional backgrounds don't
get hired... like, government doing a lot of stuff is a relatively new idea,
and it's a nice idea, but it usually doesn't work so well in practice._

What an incredibly simplistic analysis! 'Analysis' is too strong of a word;
this is mere polemic. It is clearly _not_ the case that government completely
corrupts education. It is further untrue that any of the consequences
described can be attributed entirely to the fact that government runs public
education.

The parent merely asserts that government 'corrupts' education and then lists
a bunch of alleged educational maladies. Many of these maladies are clearly
due to the fact that schools are institutions and that they serve pluralistic
communities. The point about bureaucracy is especially vacuous. Can we even
imagine a school or school district, public or private, without imagining an
attendant bureaucracy? Another poster mentioned Marx; is it lost on the parent
that Marx talks about, iirc, alienation due to private bureaucracies as well
as government ones?

The real causes of problems in education will not turn out to be so simple as
'government.' The real problems will turn out to hinge partly on the peculiar
aspects of government bureaucracies vs. private bureaucracies for sure, but
will also stem from economic issues like poverty and hunger, social and socio-
economic issues like the amount of time parents spend away from home working,
and cultural issues like the value placed on education and civic
responsibility by contemporary culture, and many other possibly irremediable
causes.

Finally, the form of the original 'argument' offered is this: There is an
overly simple problem, it has an overly simple cause, and the solution is
simply to remove that cause. The truth is that both the causes and effects of
real-world situations are both more complex and more intractable than that.
That any adult should fall for such a blatant oversimplification is perhaps a
clearer indicator of the trouble with current corporatist culture than the
addled mind of Michael Moore could ever conceive.

~~~
barry-cotter
_The point about bureaucracy is especially vacuous. Can we even imagine a
school or school district, public or private, without imagining an attendant
bureaucracy?_

Probably not above a certain minimum size (of school), but we can easily
imagine a smaller bureaucracy.

If you abolished the LAUSD or NY's and made school districts for every area
with 10,000 ± x students you could replace the vast majority of the
bureaucracy with volunteer labour, otherwise known as busybody parents.

Seriously, what is the point of having these administrators? Record keeping
and quality control are the only thingsd that come to mind. Parents have
pretty good incentives to monitor quality if they have a chance of actually
getting something done by making a stink, which becomes harder and harder the
bigger a school district becomes.

Someone explain the point of school districts above size x to me please. I
don't see any obvious economies of scale above the levels where you have
enough kids you can hire your own ful time child psychologist, and I think
10,000 people per would be well above that, and smaller than the size where
people's first response to crap schools would be to think about private
schools, and second would be to think about moving.

~~~
evgen
> If you abolished the LAUSD or NY's and made school districts for every area
> with 10,000 ± x students you could replace the vast majority of the
> bureaucracy with volunteer labour, otherwise known as busybody parents.

This only works when parents have the available free time and resources to
replace these administrators with their free time. The problem with this is
that parents with available free time and the motivation to donate to their
child's school is very unevenly distributed. You are also going to end up
duplicating a lot of administration bureaucracy across these smaller districts
and losing a lot of efficiencies that can be gained from centralization.
Centralization has its own costs, but sometimes these costs are not as large
as the cost of a lot of duplicated effort.

~~~
btilly
The problem with this argument is that the larger the distance between
bureaucracies and productive work, the more free the bureaucracy is to grow
based on internal dynamics with no reference point to actual productivity.
Therefore when it comes to bureaucracy, I generally expect centralization to
cost more.

Point of comparison based on actual statistics from Detroit 20 years ago. (See
<http://www.mackinac.org/article.aspx?ID=6014> for a citation.) Administrative
overhead for the Detroit public school system: nearly 40%. Administrative
overhead for parochial schools run by the Catholic Church: 0.7%. Key
difference? The parochial school system is bottom up, whenever possible
responsibility is pushed down to the individual school. By contrast Detroit's
schools centralize responsibility with the district, and over time that grew
into an ever expanding bureaucracy.

Admittedly not an entirely fair comparison. However decentralization sure
looks good.

------
araneae
Capitalism has its foundations in reciprocity. Instead of "I scratch your
back, you scratch mine," we have "I give you money and you give me a service
which I desire." All capitalism does is make a barter and trade system more
efficient, allowing you to trade with someone for something you want even if
you don't have anything they want. Calling that evil is sort of... dumb.

~~~
AndrewDucker
That's a tad simplistic. Capitalism rewards the externalising of costs - so,
for instance, decreasing your unit costs by increasing your pollution is more
profitable. You need external regulation to make sure that decisions are not
made solely on a capitalist basis, because that would make them entirely
heartless.

~~~
DavidSJ
All systems reward the externalizing of costs, by definition.

~~~
camccann
But they may reward externalizing different kinds of costs, and the relative
rewards may be larger or smaller than in other systems.

The question is what provides the best results (and, for that matter, how to
define "best").

------
ABrandt
I find Mr. Moore no more altruistic than the various "evils" that he
frequently attacks. His methods are equally as dubious as his opponents--the
difference is he masks himself as a benevolent crusader.

------
andrewvc
Next up on HN: Cats give their opinion on long baths

------
rms
Please don't take Michael Moore too seriously. He is an entertainer, just like
Rush on the right. The difference is that Michael Moore has talent. With Roger
and Me, he invented a new style of documentary filmmaking.

Go see the movie if you want; you will be entertained. There isn't much to
discuss here though. Yes, Moore is a hypocrite. Yes, capitalism is the best
thing we have. It's still healthy to raise awareness of some of the worst
excesses of capitalism.

------
uinuibui
The economist doesn't like Mr Moore's attack on capitalism?

Tomorrow - the Catholic News review of Dan Brown's latest.

------
projectileboy
Perhaps Mr. Moore's arguments would be made stronger if he would disclose his
net worth, and where he keeps his money?

~~~
weegee
sure, you can start and we'll just go down the line.

who CARES what the guys net worth is? Why does it matter? Can not a successful
film maker speak for those who are in the down and outs? Just because his
films are good, does that make him less worthy to call out the greedy bankers?
Who are you, Sean Hannity?!

~~~
bliving
reminded me of the line in "Roxanne":

"Oh, ho, ho, irony! Oh, no, no, we don't get that here. See, uh, people ski
topless here while smoking dope, so irony's not really a, a high priority. We
haven't had any irony here since about, uh, '83, when I was the only
practitioner of it. And I stopped because I was tired of being stared at. "

~~~
weegee
pretty idiotic reasoning. go back to school bud.

------
natmaster
I don't see how Moore can blame Capitalism for big government intervention
(bailing out banks) led by his Democratic friends. Seems more like a hit on
central banking. (But maybe that's too Jeffersonian for Moore.)

------
papyromancer
I suspect JD Lasica was right when he said it should have been called: "Greed:
A Love Story"

~~~
masklinn
Greed is pretty much inherent to capitalistic systems, which reward greed and
treat it as a virtue (along with profiteering and selfishness).

~~~
jerf
I don't think that's really the right way to think of it. Capitalism
_acknowledges_ greed, and builds a system that can survive and bring virtue in
spite of it, and to some extent, because of it.

While it's OK to decry greed, it isn't OK to build an economic system based on
the idea that people aren't greedy. They are. There are billions of year of
history behind the greed of humanity, and I'm not exaggerating. If you build
an economic system based on something that is, fundamentally, not human, you
will get bad results.

That's where other systems tend to fall down, and why for all the "failures"
of capitalism, the worst off in a modern capitalistic society is better than
all but the best off in almost any other society.

I'm willing to listen to other economic systems that also acknowledge greed. I
recommend the book "Accelerando" for a half-decent exploration of the question
of whether there is something better once you have pervasive computerization.
But the solution to the problem of greed isn't trying to build a system based
on the belief that there is some way to make people not greedy.

Greed is not capitalism's fault. Greed is, ultimately, traceable back to the
fact that for every live form that survive to reproduce, there are thousands
that don't. Greed may look odd in the incredibly, utterly strange place we
currently find ourselves in where we have more resources than we know what to
do with, but this is the strangeness, not greed.

I'm pretty skeptical of every other system I've ever seen, including socialism
and communism, because they are basically built on the idea that we'll take
control away from the greedy, shortsighted people and give it to the
enlightened, ungreedy ones who will run things better. There is of course the
(perfectly correct) argument that the information flow of such a system can't
be made to work with the tools we have, but there is also the even-more-
fundamental problem that the "enlightened, ungreedy" class of people _doesn't
exist_. There are only people _claiming_ to be the enlightened, ungreedy
class. Until you can build a non-capitalist system that isn't based on this
fundamental failure, it's not going to do well.

(That said, I'm only a little-l libertarian and I acknowledge that the
government does have a place. I'm talking economic system here, not whole
society system. Just as capitalism harnesses greed, instead of denying it, a
government should harness capitalism, instead of denying it.)

~~~
ubernostrum
What is interesting to me is the inconsistency in the arguments of big-L
libertarians, which basically boils down to claiming that self-interest will
turn into a virtuous result when a person's job title is "corporate executive"
but a vicious result when the job title is "Congressman".

In theory, democracy should exploit the same effects as unregulated or
lightly-regulated capitalism: politicians act in their self-interest (pursuing
power, prestige, etc.) but in order to do so must provide tangible benefits to
voters in order to keep getting elected.

In reality, of course, politicians run all sorts of schemes on the side to
their own personal benefit, but to the detriment of the larger body of voters.
In much the same way, executives run all sorts of schemes on the side to their
own personal benefit, but to the detriment of the larger body of shareholders
in their company (the analogue of the voters).

Yet in the politician's case this is heralded as a failure of government, and
little additional discussion takes place (since the presumption before the
fact was that government must always fail); in the executive's case all manner
of arguments are advanced to try to explain that it is not a failure of
capitalism (since the presumption before the fact was that capitalism must
never fail).

In a very real sense, then, this turns into the fallacy of begging the
question: capitalism does not fail because it is postulated that capitalism
does not fail, and government fails because it is postulated that government
fails.

~~~
dmm
The difference is that a business person makes decisions which allocate their
own capital, politicians get to play with other people's money.

~~~
ubernostrum
The business person makes decisions which allocate money provided by
investors; it is unlikely that the executive is the only, or even the
majority, investor in the business.

