Michael Moore, that earnest chubby guy with the baseball cap, is constantly on the lookout for life’s tragedies, sympathizing with working people and the poor and skewering the rich and their ever-faithful governmental servants.

In his films, books and columns, this auto worker’s son from Flint has taken on  the medical system, America’s love affair with guns and General Motors.  In his latest film: "Capitalism: A Love Story," Moore tackles perhaps his toughest subject of all -- our economic system.

It’s a wide-ranging film, from foreclosures in Peoria to Wall Street, which Moore wraps in police tape and declares a crime scene, comically attempting to regain the people’s tax money.

In typical style, Moore uses old TV commercials, newsreels and educational films to compare the U.S. with the Roman Empire.  He shows a Harvard economist hopelessly trying to explain derivatives and also the outrageous life insurance policies many blue chip companies are taking out on their own employees.

One touchstone for Moore throughout the film is his 1950s, single-earner household, a time when the wealthiest Americans paid a hefty 90 percent tax bill.  His other touchstone is the Catholic Church.  Reflecting on his altar boy youth, Moore asks various priests and a bishop, “Would Jesus approve of our economy?”  He receives strong condemnations for the greed marking our system. 

He ends with Democratic icon Franklin Roosevelt. Shortly before his death, Roosevelt pushed a “Second Bill of Rights,” promising Americans employment security, a good education and health care.  Roosevelt’s concept never became U.S. law, but Moore pointedly notes that U.S. occupiers insured that these provisions were in the post-World War II constitutions of Germany, Japan and Italy.

Challenging our presumptions about our Capitalism system is no easy task; Moore mixes the personal, comic and the political to not only win laughs, but hopefully, some thought too about our economic system, its failed promises and its consequences.