Review of Capitalism: A Love Story (2009) by Angel C — 29 May 2010

Bit of a disappointment this one. Moore on auto-pilot? A thesis to which many 'liberals' would be instinctively favourable: unregulated capitalism is socially harmful. But his argument wobbles between locally convincing detail, dubious extrapolation and unfounded assertion.

He has the smoking gun â?? the subprime meltdown, credit crunch and global slump it catalysed; but Moore fires blanks. Moore offers no cohesive argument about how the mortgage crisis happened, why the ramifications were so grave and certainly not why, as he alleges, the US government bail-out amounted to â??a financial coup dâ??étatâ??. He heralds Obama as the 2nd coming (which seems so dated); when earlier Obama had helped with the bail-out?

The thesis that untrammelled capitalism has horrific social consequences is credible and well illustrated, if hardly eye-opening to Europeans; the suggestions that that same capitalism is undemocratic and currently vulnerable to more equitable alternatives requires a stronger argument from someone other than Moore.