The Pursuit

Colorado Premiere
Why are people in advanced societies increasingly disenchanted with a system that has lifted billions of people out of poverty? Devoting himself to this riddle, conservative economist Arthur C. Brooks, the outgoing president of the American Enterprise Institute, concludes that free enterprise is the best antidote to poverty and human misery, contrasting it with the failures of “statism.” The Pursuit is an unusual polemic for Mountainfilm: asserting, in Brooks’s words, that “the American free enterprise system is our gift to the world.” Skipping from India to Brooklyn, and from Copenhagen to Barcelona to Inez, Kentucky, Brooks celebrates examples of free-market capitalism that lift people up and decries socialism and social welfare programs, however well-intended.