Capitalism: A Love Story is a documentary, made by film-maker Michael Moore, that examines the impact capitalism has on the lives of middle-class people. Moore's documentary goes on to show how capitalism used to work in the post World War II era and how it drifted from its original idea ever since there is more competition in the means of production. It shows how nowadays everything is mostly controlled  by the 1% of the population and how the country came to be manipulated by the dominant corporations. Obviously, when profit is the only goal, sacrifices have to be made and the 99% of the population are the ones paying for it. Therefore, in this film, Moore is trying to find out  what is the price Americans have to pay for their love of Capitalism (Capitalism: A Love Story).

 

As mentioned above, capitalism does come to a price because, as Moore shows it in his documentary, people still think that they have their chance to be part of the American wealth since they are living in a capitalist system. It was true after World War II where there was an actual middle-class with no debts, a house, a brand new car and a savings account for them to send their children to college and for their own retirement. All of this was made possible because the U.S had no competition when it came to production. It is shown in the documentary with the example of General Motors (GM). At the time, they were the only car producers for the United-Sate. As Moore says in his documentary '' it is easy to be number one when there is no one else in the game to compete against you''. However, as other countries started producing cars which were, and still are, known to be better and safer, GM had to start cutting in their expenses which for the most was cutting jobs. That is where the decline of the American dream started. It was the case for every other factories. Everybody had to compete against others. Therefore, every factories was cutting jobs in order to keep making profit and this is how the government started to be manipulated. The country wanted to stay number one so they started to be manipulated by the biggest corporations in the U.S. such as Goldman Sachs. It was manipulated in the way that chairman and such people that were elected were always ex-CEO's of such big corporations. The number one goal was to keep the wealth wealthy and that is what happened. However, as William Black explains, a former bank regulator in Capitalism: A Love Story, once there is a leak in a dam and you do not fix right away, it will most definitely get bigger and bigger until it collapses and that is exactly what happened on September 15th, 2008 in the United-States. The banks regulators and the ones in Washington pushed too far.

 

At first, nobody had debts and had savings account until the U.S. was not the only player anymore. Therefore, they started to promote credit lines, mortgages and credit cards to allow the population to consume as much as they used to even though there was not as many jobs as before. The more the 1% kept on cutting on jobs, the more people relied on credit to live a decent life. It seemed like a good idea since profit was still coming in for the wealthy and people were still able to consume until nobody had any more money to pay their bills to the bank creating a domino effect. This means that since people had no money for the banks, the banks had no more money coming in creating the 2008 crisis. That is when people noticed that they were betrayed by their government and started to believe in a socialist movement brought by Barack Obama.

 

By portraying this facade of capitalism, Moore demonstrated that indeed capitalism has once been good for the American population. However, he also shows that profit became an obsession for the government and that they shot themselves in the foot by trying to keep the wealth for themselves only. At the end of the documentary, Moore says '' Capitalism is evil and evil cannot be regulated, you have to eliminate it and replace it with something good. Something good that is called Democracy''. Could this be the answer for the Americans?