Having not yet seen Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story, I’d hoped that Moore would’ve addressed the most salient fact about American “capitalism:” that it is not, in fact, capitalism. Too bad that it appears not to do so.

The reality that Moore doesn’t address is that the current economic system in the US is not really capitalist. In many ways, it is eerily similar to the Soviet economy. In the Soviet Union, huge amounts of government money would go to bail out companies that could not survive on their own. If there were a real capitalism in the US, Goldman Sachs would have gone bankrupt a long time ago. The way capitalism works is that if you are inept enough to bankrupt your company, you are pushed off the market by more capable competitors. Goldman Sachs has long been completely incapable of an honest win over anybody else. They are kept in place by a complex system of Soviet-style handouts. This is as contrary to capitalism as anything can possibly be.

In a real capitalist democracy, all the top execs of Goldman Sachs would be in jail for securities fraud and for theft, rather than occupying top government positions and getting millions of dollars of bonuses. They aren’t capitalists or geniuses, just thugs in expensive suits.

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