http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/the-incoherent-agenda-of-occupy-wall-street/
With the “Occupy Wall Street” protest getting national attention thanks to the ridiculous stunt of staging a sit-in on the Brooklyn Bridge, and the even more ridiculous comparisons that some have made between this relatively insignificant protest and the massive populist movements that have helped bring political change to at least three nations, it’s time to take a look at exactly what these people are protesting about. Not surprisingly, it turns out that there’s not much there:
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A valid question indeed. For the most part, the message, of “Occupy Wall Street” seems to be little different from the same leftist critiques of free market capitalism that we’ve been seeing for decades, and just as intellectually incoherent as those ideas were back then. Politically, it’s an odd movement simply because it’s rather obvious that these are people inclined to vote for Democrats. Likely, they were people swept up in the Obamamania of 2007 and 2008. To some degree, then, one wonders if they aren’t motivated as much by disappointment in a President who clearly never really shared the “progressive” goals that they hold dear, with a little bit of soak-the-rich resentful populism mixed in for good measure.
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This “corporations run the government” meme has been around since the 1970s, and it’s no more true now than it was then. As Rick Moran points out, if corporations really ran the government would we have an EPA, OSHA, SEC, the EEOC, the FHA, the Department of Labor, or any of the other number of state and federal agencies regulate corporate behavior? If corporations truly “ran” the government, then why would any of these organizations exist?
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Other portions of the manifesto are similarly silly. Here’s just a few of the highlights:
They have taken our houses through an illegal foreclosure process, despite not having the original mortgage
Yes it’s true that the collapse of the real estate market and the foreclosure process revealed many documentation problems in the mortgage industry, but what about the fact that in the overwhelming number of these cases, these foreclosure proceedings were brought against people who didn’t pay their debts? Some of these people who just ran into bad luck when they lost their job, some of them irresponsibly bought houses they couldn’t realistically afford, and some of them were just plain old deadbeats who walked away from their justly incurred debts. Blaming corporations for the fact that people lost their houses in foreclosure is like blaming McDonald’s for the fact that we have an obesity crisis. It eliminates any element of personal responsibility so that these people can claim to themselves and others that they were the victims of some faceless corporation. In reality, they lost their houses because they didn’t live up to their contractual duties. That’s how things are supported to work.
(Article does continue. Not to mention that I skipped some parts. Zim.)
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