Occupy Wall Street is a Misinformed Fraud
Townhall.com ^ | October 10, 2011 | Jeff Carter
Varying posts of mine have elicited comments from Occupy Wall Street spokespeople. I thought that I might respond to one of them in a blogpost. Remember, I am already pitching a perfect game against them.
Now that none other than Obama babysitter and terrorist Bill Ayers has decided to break for Occupy Wall Street, I think I am on even firmer ground.
I am assuming the 1%’ers the OWS street crowd wants to send to re-education camps according to Roseanne Barr is the people that make more than $200k per year. Guess what. A lot of those people are doing it with their own risk capital. They aren’t corporate employees. For the corporate employees that earn more than that, at least they are making decisions that affect billions of dollars of shareholder money. Those corporate employees in general earn it.
How does OWS feel about union executives that earn more than most of the corporate employees that employ the union? Just sayin’.
Am I pissed off about executives of banks walking away with golden parachutes and huge bonuses after running banks into the ground? You bet. But I am smart enough to realize that the Federal Government gave them the ammo to kill their companies via Fannie and Freddie, and then saved them with TALF and TARP. You might also remember that government forced companies like Bank of America ($BAC) to merge with Merrill Lynch ($ML), and that going back to 1998, it was President Clinton and Treasury Secretary Rubin that pushed hard for ending Glass-Steagall.
So yeah, I wouldn’t have bailed out the banks. I doubt many Tea Partiers would have. We aren’t happy about the outcome either. We don’t like Dodd-Frank and think it should be repealed. But it doesn’t mean we should nationalize and socialize the entire banking system. That would cause a worse train wreck than we already have.
The OWS crowd is really ticked off about education and student debt. So am I. Why the heck do we have so many subsidies for education? It simply drives up the cost. Education is one gigantic bloated bureaucracy. However, the OWS answer is “free education and forgiveness of student loans.” Well, screw that.
Why not offer competition in education? By the way, no one put a gun to your head an told you to borrow massive sums of money for school. You could have worked your way through, went to a community college the first two years and then a four year school. Did it occur to any of you to check out how much money a typical sociology graduate degreed person made before you ponied up more than 100K to get that sociology masters? Economics work. Used correctly, they help you make good decisions. Used poorly, you do stupid things.
Which politicians are using bigotry and hate? It’s not the right that is consistently playing the race card. Right now it’s the man in the oval office. He plays it as much as he can. I don’t hear cries of racism coming from the right. Were the OWS people in Atlanta racists for not letting a former civil rights activist turned Congressman speak? Just asking.
You guys embrace Obamacare. Yet, you don’t look at how other countries have fared with socialized medicine. Canada is starting to scrap it. England is considering it too. Entitlements eat up our budget. Why not more transparency and a free market targeted to individuals in health care?
OWS wants organic produce. They want green farming. No one takes better care of their land than the guy who owns it. We also can’t feed the world using organic means. OWS would rather see children starving than people eating. There is plenty of organic produce out there. All you have to do is buy it. Why take away freedom from people that don’t want to pay for it?
On energy policy you want green energy. Don’t we all. Problem is, the stuff doesn’t work and its too expensive. The greenest, most powerful energy source out there is nuclear and I don’t see you guys campaigning for more nuclear plants. Have you seen the damage to wildlife that wind energy has created? Energy is about economics. Increase the supply of energy and all prices will come down. But, from your statements I don’t think anyone from OWS spent a lot of time in a free market economics lecture. Google this, TINFL. Understand it. Live it.
You OWS people seem to be upset at corporations that pay no tax. Me too! But, you want to tax them more. I got news for you. Corporations never pay taxes. They are simply tax aggregators. They pass the cost to their consumers. We would be better off charging companies 0% in corporate taxes and incenting them to create jobs here in the US. Then you guys could go to work, pay off your student loans and stay out of the parks so everyone could go and enjoy them.
Most of the problems in the US stem from bad public policy and big government. Governments are awfully hard to put out of business. But it’s easy to put companies out of business. Don’t buy their product. Don’t use their services. Elect Tea Party people, they’ll shrink the size of government and give you more freedom.
You seem to be upset that corporations are treated as individuals in the eyes of the law. Well, there are years and years of legal precedent associated with that. But perhaps you’d like a good reason why. Try checking out and understanding Coase Theorem. Then answer the question of who should pay for pollution control devices on a river, the factory that pollutes it or the fishermen that earn a living by hauling fish out of the river?
We can disband all the companies if you want. We can blow up Wall Street and the capital markets. We can round up all the capitalists and send them to a camp. But, sooner rather than later the totalitarian paradise you envision will be ripped apart by economics. Black markets will tear at the fabric of your structured society. Markets eliminate transaction costs, increase transparency and make things cheaper!
Why?
Because earning a profit and building economies of scale and scope are part of the human condition. Mankind has done it since the beginning of time. Our lives are easier, better and our standard of living is raised. All we really need is to get big government out of the way.
The sooner you embrace that the better off you will be.
UPDATE
Nice video exposing OWS.
Occupy Wall Street Was Organized From Day One by SEIU / ACORN Front - The Working Family Party
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
