Four Horsemen (2012)

This is worth watching more for it's cautionary value than it's message. It does a good job describing what has become of America since the Great Depression, but bases it's viewpoint on the naive idealism of the libertarian - blaming the problem on straying from "classical" economics and advocating a return to the gold standard and demonizing debt as the root of all evil. At least it admits that regulation is a good thing. It does do a good job of pointing out that libertarians and progressives share a fair amount of common ground, and might make a reasonably functional coalition against the establishment neocons and neolibs, who have already started becoming very friendly with each other, as evidenced by the current primary election shenanigans.

This movie captures the real spirit of the time. Without conspiracy theories, Illuminati and even without radical ideas it presents the causes and solutions to the problems we're facing today. It is like the Zeitgeist movies but much more logical and insightful. Instead of provoking fear it provokes thought - going as far back in time as the collapse of the Roman empire and as far in the future as the collapse of the Western global empire. Which is actually just around the corner. There are no secret societies, aliens, demons or specific ethnic groups that are to blame. The problem is in the system and if we remove its head it will just grow another one. The problem is in all of us and all of us are to blame for tolerating the system. And change is not so difficult. The movie offers classical, realistic and tested solutions like the gold standard of money and taxation based on consumption and resource extraction instead of income. And there's optimism in the end. Just like Guthenberg changed the world and ended so much suffering with a simple invention - the printing press, another invention is now causing a new Reformation and Enlightenment. The internet is the new printing press and neoclassical capitalism is the new feudalism and the new Inquisition it is fighting. In the end ideas prevail over greed. Perhaps this time it will happen with less bloodshed.

The good: Four Horsemen has a few good punch lines. Furthermore, some of the photography/scenes are not too bad. The very bad: There are several logical errors in this movie. The storyboarding is totally absent. I wonder if the move makers understand their own message. They did not justify or explained their claims in the movie. I give you some examples of their claims: The West Civilization is ending because we are in general more interested in sex, we endorse our chefs in reality television programs etc.Wall street and their banks are guilty in all poverty in the world. The architects behind the deregulated Wall Street are called "modern Neocapitalism economists" – with "evil leaders" such as Ronald Reagan and Thatcher as examples. The greatest evil of them all is of course Goldman Sachs (The CEO must be the devil himself).They are also the guilty ones for terrorism: They make farmers poor, that justify them to be terrorists.Actually, all banks are evil – They produce all the money they want and create inflation.All infrastructure build in the Third World, financed by Wall Street and their fellow evils, will not benefit anyone else than Wall Street (regards to interest rate). The new infrastructure will not help the local economy grow at all.The only solution to the world's problem is to roll back to the classic economy, to reintroduce the gold standard – the standard economic unit of account is a fixed weight of gold. Hence, we should reintroduce the ideas of Adam Smith.Talking about Adam Smith, we should reintroduce the principle that tax on income equals slavery. The solution is tax on natural resources. Also the pharmaceutical industry is evil, speculating in dying people in Africa - And so on..If any of this is the truth, the solution would have been very easy. Let's remove Goldman Sachs, and we would be rid of all problems in the world over night. Probably this movie only appeals to very idealistic young girls, member of the local communist party as a protest to their parents. For everyone else, save your money and time (or at least have a good laugh). If nothing else, at least this movie demonstrates that economy and finance is not easy to understand, not even for academics, on the contrary. Without common sense, it is very easy to misunderstand.

"Four Horsemen" is the debut feature from writer and director Ross Ashcroft and the four parts of this documentary address the banking crisis, the terrorism threat, worldwide poverty and ecological collapse respectively. While worthy, well-intentioned and (mostly) well-evidenced, for the non-political, this critique of rampant capitalism is probably heavy going with lots of talking heads - no less than 23 experts, including many senior economists and academics, express their trenchant views.The film seems to have been popular in film festivals and indeed I saw it at the first London Labour Film Festival where it was applauded at the end, but it has some major deficiencies.First, it is overly ambitious in scope and should perhaps have concentrated simply on the crisis of the banking sector. The links between the four threats were not always made clear and the section on terrorism was particularly weak and over simplistic. Second, the policies promulgated at the end - while rooted in a pro-capitalist position intended to be 'realistic' - involve some outrageously fanciful notions such as returning to a gold standard and abolishing income tax. I would like to know more about Ross Ashcroft and the funding of this work which might explain the source of these odd notions. Third, at no point in either the analysis or the prescription does the film acknowledge that economic and societal change does not start with institutional reform but with the organisation of workers, consumers and citizens. Real change comes through people working together in political parties, trade unions, pressure groups, and social movements.For all these weaknesses, "Four Horsemen" does make you think and will engender much-needed debate about the urgent need to reform radically our ideas on how we create, consume and distribute wealth and how we regulate and control the institutions involved.