A clear concise piece describing why you have to be ignorant or gullible to be supportive of the Occupy Wall Street movement.
What is remarkable to me is how otherwise observant, thoughtful individuals have excused the endless stream of criminal acts perpetrated at and by OWS crowds. The line, as it goes, is: All causes or political movements are going to have fringe elements, and they are going to behave badly or stupidly. But you can't judge the whole based on the actions of those few. Their overall message is sound, and you can't discredit the people or their message, or allow yourself to be distracted from that message because of these acts.
There are two problems with this position. First of all, their message, their position, their entire ideology is far from sound. Don't let hypnotic, deadpan, monotone NPR radio announcers lull you into a sense of apathy or, worse, comfort over these people. The OWS people will tell you there is this system and it is designed to work against you, but there really is no "system." There are numerous, individual agreements between adults to exchange value: effort as any combination of talent, physical labor or intellectual skill for currency. And it's not exploitative; it is mutually beneficial. Suppose you make a lot of money; you can then hire me, as an employee, or as a vendor to help you make more, and if your business does well and I'm an investor, I make money when your stock goes up; when you make more money, you can open more stores so I have better selection, lower prices, and a closer, more convenient trip to make. In America and countries like it, quality, hard work and acceptance of personal responsibility results in success–if not now, certainly for your future. However, since this does leave out everyone who does not do those things, Occupy Wall Street finds its opening with such persons.
OWS asserts that, currently, the power is in the hands of the wealthy but that it should be the hands of academics and other people smarter than you and, therefore, know better than you what's best for you and everyone else. So their stated mission is replace the system with a new one that is leaderless. However, this is not an honest statement because it is incongruous with their perception of society. Social justice implies someone is being wronged (perhaps exploited or outright stolen from), and that there is a judicial punishment. Therefore, people that stratify society by classes of victims according to gender, race or even sexual orientation are doomed to seek supremacy, not just opportunity equality, for these victim classes. When you see someone demanding social justice, they are looking to shift the class for whom they see as the owner of social power; a shift that moves power from the so-called "haves" to the so-called "have-nots." It sounds like a good idea, but it isn't, and history proves it.
Look at the legacy of Che Guevara, Hugo Chavez and Venezuela or Fidel Castro's Cuba, the revolution that brought the Ayatollah to power in Iran or Kim Jong-Il and Mao's famine-stained brand of Communism in North Korea and China. The reality is, the only place where Communism ever "works" is when it is brought about through intimidation, fear, actual torture and death. While propaganda from the American Left perpetuates conspiracy concepts around the so-called military-industrial complex accusing the CIA and the Pentagon of all sorts of "black helicopter" or "men-in-black" tactics to silence political dissidents, you have actual oppression throughout Islamic Arab countries, Socialist Central and South American banana republics, and communist regimes in parts of Africa and Asia. Actual kidnappings, rapes, murders of people and their families, including children for preserving power.
In that world, there is no constitution that limits the government. There is no legislative representation. There is no due process. There is just the way of the state and what the intellectuals have decided for you, as an adult, what is best and right for you. Socialism is the creed of shared misery. Communism is the philosophy of outcome equality through universal failure. And they sell it on the concept that if nobody is rich, then there can be no one in a class above you. But that is the biggest lie of all, because the advocates of that system want to be in the class above you that tells you what you can or cannot drive, eat or buy, or how much money you are allowed to earn. The road to hell was paved with good intentions and the message of the Occupy Wall Street movement is no exception.
Then, there is the "every political movement has a fringe element" excuse. This does not fly because in another well-known political movement called the Tea Party protests, you did not have numerous felonies. Tea Parties have not hosted shootings, murders, dead bodies, sexual assaults including rape, public masturbation, public fornication, vandalism–including defecation on police vehicles, open use of illegal narcotics, trespassing, battery of journalists and peace officers, theft of private property, public health code violations and untold economic damage to the local businesses whose customers do not want to risk blood and urine being thrown at them while standing at a hot-dog cart. You can Google every single last incident I've named to find they've happened at least once in every single city where OWS has darkened the pavement.
There are too many of these incidents to call them one-offs in the same way that out of the 1.2 Million tea party protesters that showed up in Washington, D.C., you might have had a few dozen people hoisting racially incentive picket signs directed toward the President. However, not only were there very few outsiders willing to explain them away as minor, fringe elements that do not represent the core values of the Tea Party, there is former President Jimmy Carter claiming that the heart of their opposition to the President is based in racism. At Tea Party protests, parks have been left in nicer condition than before they arrived. Will we be able to say the same when the OWS crowd is eventually evicted from the parks and lawns of public buildings in our cities? If it was anything like the union losers that tried to occupy the state capitol in Wisconsin when Scott Walker tried to institute fiscal sanity in that state, the answer will be: of course not.
So, certainly, crony capitalism between Democrats in Congress and in the White House financial institutions–either through collusion or severe legal pressure–that nearly destroyed the American economy in 2008 is bad. However, the only thing worse than a problem is a bad solution. There are good solutions to that problem, and, it would be one thing if the OWSers were just too stupid to avoid bad solutions. But this is exploitation. The Occupy Wall Street people are gunning for the most important American value that there is, Individual Liberty, and they are exploiting the misery caused by Left-wing, big government policy to advance a cause that will end Individual Liberty.
Support that at your own risk.
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