'Where To Invade Next'

Michael Moore's Timely Polemic

GS got me out to one of his free movie night courtesy of the ethics society. I think I'm on a good wicket here. It's for hard to convince one self to get to the cinema when your income drops - so a special shout out to GS who keeps asking me to go watch these films with him. As with 'Eye in the Sky' this film deserves a write up too.

It's been a long time since I last saw a Michael Moore film. The way I see it, I don't really need the heavy-handed propagandising that he carried out with 'Capitalism: A Love Story' because I'm pinko enough and I'm not an American so I can't vote to change America; so with me, Moore's preaching to the choir in the wrong church in the wrong suburb. All the same I got emboldened by the freebie I saw last time which was 'Eye in the Sky' and thought I may as well catch up with GS again and catch what Michael Moore had to say this time.



What's Good About It

As polemical tirades from Michael Moore go, this one's a lot gentler and perhaps more probing. The central idea is what is it that the European states got going so well that the USA doesn't but from which it could easily learn. The premise takes him to a series of countries where various policies are explored in context of the people they serve. Moore then throws the American political discourse at the locals to see if it sticks and in most part it doesn't seem to gain any traction at all.

In most parts, what Michael Moore is recommending is common sense through to a little bit extraordinary. That would be my own cultural spyglass distorting my view of what Moore uncovers in Europe. Surely no state - certainly not America - and probably not Australia could adopt all those things and keep a balanced budget. I'll get into it bit more in a moment but suffice to say the survey is optimistic about what can actually be done.

Also, the film gets out to Iceland where they jailed the bankers and makes its strong case for totally equal rights and access for women, where the Icelandic women have some choice words for America. When asked for 2 minutes to advise America, the female CEO of a company tells Moore that she would not like to move to America because they would make bad neighbours and they treat their fellow Americans badly. She says she can't understand how Americans live with themselves knowing how badly they treat one another. It's a corker of a moment when an ethos borne out of a deeply cohesive culture slams the rampant individualism of America.

What's Bad About It

Michael Moore is cherrypicking the good things from these countries without going into how those things are being costed. He talks a little about the history of how some of these admirable institutions came into being, but the potted history is so abbreviated it lacks a logical persuasiveness. He also basically meets people who want to show off their best and he accepts these things without much critical assessment.

The film is also a little long-winded. by the 5th country being introduced, we're sort of tiring of the ruse. They could have sharpened the film more in the editing suite. It's not a bad film by any stretch of the imagination, but it isn' as sharp as his more polemic films and maybe a little tired in parts.

What's Interesting About It

Some of these European countries Moore visits - Italy, France, Germany and Portugal - have serious economic problems. Part of the problem is that all of these countries have large deficits they cannot rein in. Italy and Portugal in particular, as part of the PIIGS, are in danger of sovereign default. France's Debt to GDP ratio is above 100%. Germany is sitting on Deutsche bank which might blow up with $60 trillion worth of bad derivatives has written - many on the back of Greek Government debt. Should Deutsche Bank blow up, Germany might embark on a massive bailout instead of letting the banks fail like the Icelanders did, and give rise to more massive government debts. These are things that were not being discussed at all in the film, and gets to the crux of the argument.

America by comparison runs a much smaller government if you exclude its extraordinary military spending. The argument can be boiled down to whether the states carrying out these wonderful programmes really can afford to keep carrying out these wonderful programmes. It is arguable that the Italian regime of holidays is costing the government and economy too much; or that the French lunch at schools programme is too expensive; or the work conditions in Germany are too lenient. The poster child for such arguments is actually Greece, where after the GFC, they became known to France, Italy and Germany for having too many perks.

Greece is of course paying a terrible price today, just to preserve the Euro. The countries that benefit the most from this arrangement also happen to be France, Italy and Germany, while Portugal is staring down the barrel at becoming like Greece. It is easily argued that France, Italy and Germany get to preserve their wonderful entitlements at the expense of the Greek poor. France, Italy and Germany also get to export their goods denominated in the Euro, which allows their produce to be more competitive thanks to the Euro depressing their prices. If they had to do it with their own currencies, they would be much less competitive. It's an arrangement that works doubly better than it does for Greece that has no benefits in trading on the Euro, has no significant export industries except tourism, and carries its massive government debt in Euros, all of this just to preserve the Euro.

For a more balanced argument, Moore needed to go to Greece and get their story.

What Windfalls Buy

Another interesting topic of note was Finland's education system, which has shot to the top of the world in the last 15years. As Moore notes, for much of the Twentieth Century, Finland's schools and students did no better than the Americans. Then, it reorganised its educational system, giving rise to the tremendous results it boasts today. The thing is, Finland did on the back of the economic windfall from mobile technology. The temporary but significant popularity of Nokia phones gave rise to a massive rise in revenues in Finland which could then afford to re-organise its schools.

The parallels there would be with Australia which had its once in a lifetime commodity super-cycle, giving rise to the revenues from the mining boom. Of course Kevin Rudd tried to harness those revenues with a Mining Tax which ended up getting him removed. Julia Gillard then went and instituted the NAPLAN based on the Gonski report. While it is horses for courses, the one recommendation the Fins give to Americans in this film is to not have a national standardised test.  And not to have private schools that reinforce class differences. They're great suggestions that will doubtless fall on deaf ears in Australia as well as America.

The status quo in this country at least says private education is here to stay, so within it we can see it is our State's commitment to preserving class stratification. They can say whatever they like about Gonski and NAPLAN and whatever it is they think they're doing - the government is building a patchwork quilt of bullshit to paper over the stark reality that they are willing to accept class stratification in our society, with all the ills it presents. It's disappointing, and more so when it comes from the ALP on the centre-left. If anything is for certain, this film convinced me to hate private education even more than I do already.

Legalising Drug Use

Portugal's contribution to Michael More's haul is about legalising drugs. This one stands in stark contrast to the other policies Moore brings back in that it would cut law enforcement costs significantly to stop criminalising drug use and medicalising it. The Portuguese police argue that it has to do with human dignity, but as with all things it is probably rooted in the economics of the drug trade.

A good portion of the drugs our societies worry about come from plants and farmed plants at that. Even LSD was originally extracted from a plant. Marijuana, Heroin, Cocaine are all grown in quantities by farmers under the control of warlords. They do so because together, they can produce a substance that returns multiples on investments. The nexus of drugs and arms is possible only because of the large margin in the drug trade - and what enables this large margin is the scarcity created by the states who try and block supply.

The criminalising of the demand is a complement to the blocking of supply which Moore's film argues is actually a racist ploy to decimate the Black leadership in America. All the same, the prices go up because the war on drugs makes the value of illegal substances higher, which benefits the drug lords and warlords in central America and Afghanistan much more than it benefits the citizens of the first world.

What the Portuguese example illustrates is what happens when the state refuses to cooperate with the marketing plans of the drug lords and reduces the margin. The flow of drugs falls to a level that matches the natural demand for them, which turns out to be much lower than when the state is policing the users, criminalising the demand. The crime rate goes down because it is less onerous to service the drug money. As with ending prohibition of alcohol, the violent crime relating to the drug trade goes down because it becomes less valuable. Illegal motorcycle gangs would fear the decriminalisation of drug use the most because it would decimate their margins.

You'd think after 40 years of Nixon-ian racist paranoia that our society could find the simple courage to do what Portugal did.