Cheap Trick

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Michael Moore is sometimes an entertaining filmmaker, and sometimes he has something interesting to say. But he just doesn't seem to be able to resist using cheap tricks to try to bolster his case. For example, in Capitalism: A Love Story, he includes a scene where he tries to demonstrate that the United States is not an intrinsically "capitalist nation" by pawing through the U. S. Constitution looking for the word 'capitalism.' However, 'capitalism' was not used to describe an economic system until about 1850. So the fact that the drafters of the Constitution did not use a terminology that lay 70 years in their future is hardly surprising, and proves exactly nothing.

UPDATE: Here is another word that doesn't occur in the U. S. Constitution, which certainly did exist to describe a political system at that time, and which is Moore's favored alternative to capitalism: 'democracy.'

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