To understand the implications of what Michael Moore has said, let’s start with something basic. What money is? Money is a tool we use to store the value of our labor. Think of it this way, when you are asked to provide a service to another person, such as working eight hours in the burger mines, you normally demand compensation for your efforts. Money is what is used to compensate you.
If there was no such thing as money, this process of providing services would be much more complex. What you would be facing would be a barter system where you would need to find someone who (1) wants your services, (2) is willing to meet your price, AND (3) has something you are willing to accept in trade. Thus, a bicycle shop owner may want you to work as his doctor, but if you don’t want a bicycle, then you can’t reach a deal, unless the shop owner happens to find a third party who has what you want and who happens to be willing to trade that for a bicycle. You see the problem?
Money eliminates this third requirement. It is a convenience, that lets you trade your labor without having to engage in a wasteful and difficult barter system of matching wants. Thus, the bicycle shop owner can give you money rather than giving you bicycles or needing to find something else you are willing to accept.
Moreover, money lets you store the value of your labor for the future. In the barter world, you either need to trade immediately for goods and services, or you run the risk that the bike shop owner might not pay his debt to you when you finally ask for it -- a serious risk which grows worse the longer you wait. But money has value separate and apart from the promises of any one person with whom you’ve bartered. Therefore, the risk of waiting to spend it are much reduced and you can safely collect money by expending labor in the present for use in the future. Hence, money lets us go from being a consuming species that needs to work constantly for its day-to-day needs, to being a species that can plan for the long term and save for the future.
Indeed, without money, there would be no retirement and the old and the infirm would be extremely poor as their labor has little value compared to the young -- unless you believe in communism, which says that all labor belongs to the state and the state has the right to take it from everyone and dole it out as the state sees fit.
This is why money is a means for storing the value of our labor. We expend labor to earn it, and as long as we hold it, we have a claim to the value of that labor which can be “cashed in” for goods or services at any point.
So what happens when you take someone’s money? You turn them into slaves because you deprive them of the value of their labor, just as if you watched someone work for the bicycle and then took the bicycle away. Thus, when Michael Moore talks about rich people’s money being a “national resource” which belongs to us, what he’s suggesting is that we have a right to deprive rich people of the value of their labor, i.e. to make them our slaves.
And lest you think I’ve exaggerating what idiot Moore has said, check out this quote from an interview with GRITtv:
Some would call this communism, but it’s not. Moore isn’t advocating that everyone be deprived of their labor and the benefits of that theft be passed out to everyone according to their needs, which would be communism or collectivism. Instead, he’s advocating taking money just from a certain class of people, i.e., the rich. That’s called slavery. Indeed, that’s the same thing as if he had said: “look at all those day laborers who have all that labor to give, but they greedily only give it for money. That’s our labor, we should force them to work for us.”"[The rich are] sitting on the money, they're using it for their own -- they're putting it someplace else with no interest in helping you with your life, with that money. We've allowed them to take that. That's not theirs, that's a national resource, that's ours. We all have this -- we all benefit from this or we all suffer as a result of not having it."
If Moore believed in taking everyone’s property and passing it out, then I would call him a communist. But as long as he advocates doing this only to certain people, then I say he wants to be a slave owner.
That’s why he’s despicable. . . well, it’s one of many reasons.
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