Occupiers Seek End to Income Differences, cont.page 2
The movement was begun by the good folks who brought us maple syrup, polite comedians, brutal hockey players, and round ham slices that they call bacon. Canadians. The Canadian magazine Adbusters, operated by a nongovernment organization of the same name, suggested that people protest Wall Street, and about a thousand demonstrators showed up in the financial district in New York City on September 17, 2011to air their grievances against greedy and criminal Wall Street investors and unethical investment practices. After about three months of generalized complaining, staged occupations of public parks in major cities, and ad hoc organization of permitless hippie encampments in public spaces in cities around the nation, and the Occupy Movement drew up an official Declaration of its complaints and bold assertions.
No “true democracy is attainable when the process is determined by economic power.” “Corporations do not seek consent to extract wealth from the people and the Earth….” “We come to you at a time when corporations, which place profit over people, self-interest over justice, and oppression over equality, run our governments.”
Occupiers demonize all corporations, even those against which no charge of illegality has ever been made. They criticize making a profit and staying viable, trotting out old Marxist maxims about faceless, greedy businesses oppressing the people they employ and the customers they serve, while also finding time to run the government.
No corporation could exist if corporations were run like a Supercommittee of bickering Democrats and Republicans trying to agree on a payroll tax extension.
The Occupier’s Declaration, full of hyperbole and simplistic sloganeering, signals the loss of any integrity the protesters may have gained in the sincerity of their indignation. Sympathy wanes. When they trash the parks they occupy, clog public pathways, accost others and badger others who aren’t part of the protest, defecate on American flags, throw bottles and M-80 fireworks at police in New York and Boston, they lose their decency and public support.
According to Associated Press reporter Amy Westfeldt, “Los Angeles member Mario Brito said the movement plans to pressure elected and bank officials for a moratorium on foreclosures, and said members would ‘occupy’ bank lobbies, boardrooms and executives’ homes to force the action.” (Westfeldt).
Disruption and violence by vocal masses are components in the protester’s strategy book. Property damage hurts capitalists, forcing them to make repairs, assure customers of continued high-quality service, and reroute business processes around any damaged infrastructure. It is thought that those who are hurt will get over their anger about the disruption of their business and come to understand the point of view of the unruly, unshaven, criminal protesters, actually hear what the protesters have to say.
The protest movement’s chain of reasoning is naïve, or simply a justification for protesters wanting to raise hell, riot, and make police forces look like bullies in trying to contain the violence and civil unrest. The insurance companies who hold policies on damaged property pay for the destruction, while the more aggressive protesters are jailed for months and get a criminal record that dogs them the rest of their lives. Some feel that no social change is possible without force, though voting into office the right politician often leads to change. In most cases, the model of society sought by radicals simply is not preferred by the vast majority who want structured personal freedom, order, enforcement of laws against property theft and damage, and security from personal harm. Most people don’t envision living their lives in a failed, communistic system of arbitrary rewards and punishments and bureaucratic whim.
Redistribution of wealth through taxation mirrors the protester’s advocated use of force. Managed through IRS enforcement, redistribution is a process that is entirely dependent on the use of force. Columnist A. Barton Hinkle writes that the Occupiers prefer forced equality over liberty, and he documents a number of cases of inequities between city management’s more lenient treatment and liberal allowances to the marching Occupying forces compared to the formal legal requirements enforced on Tea Party organizers who stage public gatherings. With growing impatience in New York City, Mayor Michael Bloomberg finally authorized the arrest of 700 nonviolent protesters on the Brooklyn Bridge near Liberty Plaza in Lower Manhattan for failure to present a permit for the congregation and failure to disperse.
George Reisman, a Pepperdine University Professor Emeritus of Economics and frequent blogger on economic issues, agrees that it’s fairly obvious that the protesters want the seizure of wealth from the 1% and a redistribution of the money to the lower income populations. “In other words, the implicit program of the protesters is that of socialism and the redistribution of wealth” (Reisman).
But it’s the intellectual shortfall and outright dishonesty that will bury the movement, not the unrealistic breadth of demands or the increasingly annoying media exposure.
Protesters complain that there is no social justice, no economic justice. This is true—social and economic justice are make-believe concepts, so they cannot exist in reality. Some want to “take the country back,” but this is a meaningless and vague slogan that advocates a coup on capitalism. Some want corporations to be responsible to customers, but this isn’t how capitalism works. They want the wealthy to pay their fair share, but the wealthy pay more than their fair share: the top 5% paid 60% of their federal personal income in tax in 2006, a disproportionate amount. They vengefully lash out at the wealthy, saying that the poor were devastated in the recent economic crisis, though actually the wealthy were hit harder. A 2011 Congressional Budget Office study of households between 1979 and 2007 omitted the nearly decade’s worth of earnings lost by the top quintile of earners, nearly a quarter of their net worth, due to the mortgage crisis and the stock market meltdown in 2008 and 2009. Still, the middle earners experienced about a 40% gain, and the bottom saw an 18% gain (adjusted for inflation).
According to Westfeldt in a recent AP article, the list of demands by protesters “ranged from the simple−get corporate money out of politics−to the ethereal (make sure Washington politicians act with a moral conscience)” (Westfeldt). According to one protester, “The greater purpose [is] to foster broad cultural changes that will gradually empower people to stop depending on big corporations and Wall Street money.” People are empowered by free will to stop depending on other people’s money, but most choose not to, demanding more, rather than less, government aid and subsidy.
Protesters know, but pretend not to, that the rich don’t take from the poor, but rather give through employment and products that would otherwise not be available at any cost; that the money supply grows, rather than being a limited commodity; that no one must lose money because someone else gains money; that everyone who wants to can become rich if they work hard enough and study hard enough and make the right choices, despite the rich corporations’ influence in Washington to draft laws and business regulations that quash competition.
Divvying up land mass on a map of the U.S. to dramatically show how much 99% of land versus 1% pictorially constitutes is a “perfect illustration of the [Occupy] movement's economic misunderstandings,” according to Steve Chapman.
“Land, after all, is more or less fixed in supply. I can’t obtain more of it unless someone gives up theirs.
“But wealth and income are not like land. To start with, they are not limited in supply—they can multiply many times over without end, and they have done just that. And, unlike with patches of soil, everyone can get more without anyone consigned to less” (Chapman).
According to Chapman, the “wealthy are far better off than they used to be. But their improvement has not come at the expense of those down the economic ladder. Economists Bruce D. Meyer of the University of Chicago and James X. Sullivan of the University of Notre Dame find that over the past three decades, both the poor and the middle class have made substantial material progress.
“‘Median income and consumption both rose by more than 50 percent in real terms between 1980 and 2009,’” they reported last month in a paper for the conservative American Enterprise Institute in Washington. Those in the bottom tenth of the income ladder enjoyed comparable gains” (Chapman).
The protesters lie to themselves that the income gap must be closed, artificially, by government mandate, because they themselves failed to achieve more in the capitalist system. Therefore, wealth in itself is touted as evidence of injustice, so wealth must be forcibly taken by the government and given to those less fortunate.
It’s not the bailout of criminal corporations that they protest, but the unavailability of those taxpayer bailout dollars to government social welfare programs that would then be transferred to themselves. But only a slight uptick in the wealth is attributable to a higher percentage of wealth transfers in the form of corporate and bank bailout. Though the absolute dollars in transfers to the poor have also increased (because the government is giving out more all around, escalating the spending budget), protesting liberals are infuriated that the federal government has determined that sustaining major financial institutions and the mortgage industry is a higher priority than cutting food stamp checks.
“Eventually, you run out of other people’s money. And when you do, you have to make hard choices about whose needs to prioritize—not demonize opponents” (Dalmia).
It’s not the lack of jobs that Occupiers protest, but their own inability to gain employment. It’s a selfish motive, which is fine, but petty when left unacknowledged and when the protesters hypocritically accuse the wealthy of the same selfish motives. It’s also hypocritical to decry tax-payer funded bank bailouts while also demanding taxpayer bailouts in the form of student and mortgage loan forgiveness.
The protesters know that not the existence of money, but corrupt politicians who take campaign bribes from wealthy corporate CEOs are to blame for undue corporate influence in Congress. It’s not the corporation’s fault if they must bribe to compete with other corporate bribers for favorable laws regarding their business. New laws have rendered moot the concerns about monetary influences. The January 2010 Supreme Court decision in the Citizens United case ruled that government didn’t have the right to regulate free speech, even when that speech involved unlimited monetary contributions to political campaigns by corporations (now defined as persons) and anonymous donors, effectively overturning the McCain-Feingold law that had set tight restrictions on such donations.
Inequality of wealth does not leave the poor with
less political clout than the more wealthy. “According to historian R.H. Tawney,
‘Oppression…is not less oppressive when its strength is derived from superior
wealth, than when it relies on a preponderance of physical force.’ But
regardless of how much wealth a person owns, he has no legal right to coerce
other citizens. The possession of great wealth makes it easier for a person to
persuade other people to serve him by making them better offers than they
receive elsewhere, but this is unlike holding a gun to someone’s head. As
philosopher Ayn Rand declared, “Economic power is exercised by means of a
positive, by offering men a reward, an incentive, a payment, a value; political
power is exercised by means of a negative, by the threat of punishment, injury,
imprisonment, destruction.”
“Economic power is the power resulting from the
possession of wealth. Political power is the power resulting from the
government’s monopoly on coercion.” (Rand, OPAR, p. 402). “Economic power is
power. Any proper value is a form of power; it endows its possessor with
capabilities that nonpossessors lack. If this were not so, the object would not
be a value. In a free society, however, no man’s powers, however great, are a
hindrance to anyone else; they are a benefit to others” (Rand, OPAR, p. 403).
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