The “Occupy Wall Street” protestors seem, mostly, to be against rich people.
But it’s not wealth as such that sparked the protests, is it? The ranks of the self-proclaimed 99-percenters may be filled with miseducated anti-capitalists, but the occasion of their ire seems fairly clear:
- It’s the depression, stupid — or the stupid depression. The enduring character of it.
- It’s the bailouts. A lot of borrowed money was thrown at “successful” people to make sure they remained “successful.”
- It’s the frightening instability of our basic institutions, including government itself.
So of course folks protest.
Too bad they have barely two clues to rub together.
The general cluelessness does not end at the overflowing toilets and excrement-stained police vehicles. When the protests went global, the New York Times reported on the “thousands of people marching past ancient monuments and gathering in front of capitalist symbols like the European Central Bank in Frankfurt.”
Jeffrey Tucker of the Mises Institute expressed his incredulity:
A government-created institution that creates a government-issued paper currency that is a shabby piece of paper thanks to government intervention in order to bail out government-subsidized and government-sustained institutions. And they call this a capitalist symbol?
Obviously, “capitalism” today means “state capitalism” or “crony capitalism,” not laissez-faire. That some folks still think we live in a “free market” — and blame everything now not working on that system — demonstrates the need for careful distinctions from those of us who know better.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
5 replies on “The Ism in Need of a Schism”
In Atlanta this week the media, in attempting to appear as though they were delivering news, interviewed one of the Occupy Atlanta crowd. They focussed upon a lady who had graduated with a 4 year degree in economics, who had been unable to find a job in this chosen field and who had to “settle” for working in day care. And who was railing about the corrupt system that cold not provide her the desired job.
Irony is apparantly lost on those who need it the most.
She had no inkling that the very capitalist system that she was protesting was the only system likely to have the largesse to ever hire her. Or that the government regulation of the “fat cats” such as Bank America that she and her ilk were calling for more of had just fomented another round of layoffs as the banks struggle to keep head above water. Or perhaps she thinks that when all of the companies and banks are all centrally controlled that they will somehow magically suddenly need her.
It’s fun to be a lib/prog, as long as you get to be one of the folks in charge, rather than one of the formerly middle-class underlings who are being regulated to doing manual labor in the socialist utopia.
She hasn’t realized yet that she didn’t make the cut.
What (it seems to me) that many of these “protestors” don’t realize, is, their “HEROS”–Obama and his ilk, are responsible for much of the bailouts. And the 1.3 Trillion dollar deficit.
In the 2008 election cycle, as reported, Goldman, Sachs gave some 73% of their PAC and executive contributions to Obama and the Democrats. I recall reading that a Merrill Lynch executive said Obama would be better for Wall Street-deficits would have to be finance3d, hence underwriting and other fees.
As to the banks-many deserve to fail; they get government $$$ and give bonuses to the people who got them into the mess. (Recall Merrill/ B of A giving multi million dollar bonuses to the architects of the Merrill meltdown, etc).
The Occupiers should join the Tea party–seems to me to have some of the same goals.
One point Paul:
Although the media would like to creat the impression that these protests started here; they did not. They were going strong in Europe when I was there last year. These are well organized protests with a lot of marxist money behind them. If you remember, some of these groups announced last year that they were going to bring this to America. There is not a trace of spontaneity in this. The 99% Occupiers are mere puppets in their own parade…
Already well detailed in the dull, rambling and unpleasant book:
The Coming Insurrection.
Isn’t everything that is wrong with our economy today due to the fact that it is NOT laissez-faire? In a true laissez-faire system, companies that are “too big to fail” don’t fail, while companies that are too big to ‘let fail’ don’t exist. In a true laissez-faire system, no company is ‘too big to fail’. The American worker is caught in the middle. How do we compete with people who can do our job for twenty cents on the dollar? How about telling companies that move our jobs overseas to sell their goods overseas? How about telling the countries of the world to defend themselves? Americans who can’t earn a living can’t pay taxes and they can’t pay for the policing of the world and they can’t buy the goods of multi-national corporations.