Michael Moore vs. Thomas Sowell: A Hate Story – by Chanda Chisala | FrontPage Magazine

Michael Moore vs. Thomas Sowell: A Hate Story – by Chanda Chisala | FrontPage Magazine: "Michael Moore is not a hypocrite. He may just be sincerely misguided.

Yes, he has made millions of dollars from his documentaries which attack the profit motive of the capitalist system, and this does indeed look like the most embarrassing irony for him. But when you understand him, or at least when you understand his misunderstanding of capitalism, you will see that he is not in fact consciously contradicting himself. He is merely a victim of a common but very subtle economic fallacy that has afflicted societies since ancient times.

In his many books on economics and sociology, the economics historian Thomas Sowell of the Hoover Institution has identified this fallacy that consistently occurs in all societies that have had to deal with what are called “middleman minorities” – small groups of people within a nation that tend to make their money from certain middleman occupations (retailing, money-lending, distribution, etc). The Jews in Europe, the Chinese in South East Asia, the Ibos in Nigeria, the Armenians in the Ottomon Empire, the Indian Gujaratis in East Africa, and many other groups, were all middleman minorities in these regions.

These groups also happened to be hated in these communities, especially in times when the rest of the society was not doing so well economically. In explaining why they were despised so much, Sowell blames this most persistent of ancient economic fallacies: the idea that such people do not ‘make’ anything.

Everyone can see them build growing fortunes, but they can also see that they are not manufacturing any tangible thing. They simply transport goods from one point to another or they just charge interest on the money they lend, and so on.

What happens next in these societies follows a well-established script. Some charismatic individuals, usually from the elite class, start affirming the sentiments of the poor majority by telling them that the reason they are poor is in fact because of the same “parasitic” activities of these “greedy” minorities who contribute nothing to the economy."