Two reactions to the film:
- I’m sure people love to hate this film for a number of reasons. What struck me is why this young man, if he’s so serious about finding answers about wealth and inequality in the U.S., never bothers to talk to any of the people who devote their lives to study these issues in a rigorous way. A considerable part of the discipline of sociology in the U.S. is dedicated to questions of class, inequality, stratification and related issues. Instead he talks to Ralph Nader (ok), Kevin Phillips (so-so), and Robert Reich (ugh!). What he gets from these eminent men, all of whom are first and foremost actors in the political system narrowly defined, are lamentations about how everything is oh so bad. What gets lost is the most crucial part of the story, which is that inequality in America isn’t just a lamentable moral shortcoming, but a social struggle. If he’d talked to somebody like Fran Piven, Johnson could have learned about the poor people’s movements that engage in this struggle. If he had talked to a scholar of class, he could have found out about the history of the movements that resisted massive inequality and exploitation—and took a pummeling by his fellow one percenters. This history absent in his story, so we are left with the bleak picture of sociopaths calling the shots.
- Wow, I did not realize that Milton Friedman was so dumb. Maybe it’s his old age at the time of the interview or the fact that he has to put up with this whippersnapper who didn’t do his homework. Even so, I thought the kneejerk equation of taxation or social policy with “socialism” was confined to bozos like Glenn Beck. I thought Friedman had a more sublimated version of ruling-class ideology. Not so. Friedman also reveals the authoritarian streak in his personality when he abruptly cuts off the interview (though again, perhaps that’s just a justified reaction to the whippersnapper).
