The occupiers are barking up the wrong tree. The problem isn’t capitalism — it’s government power. They’re right to complain about big bank bailouts, but capitalists can’t do this in a free market. Only the government can steal money from taxpayers and give it to the banks.
ACORN’s involvement in organizing the Occupiers is proof that they’re simply doing the bidding of the ruling elite; while they might not know it, the Occupiers are acting as their useful idiots. Socialist movements always use such dupes to give them the cover of “popular demand.”
What they don’t understand — and what the Tea Party most certainly does understand — is that free markets are NOT pro-business. The operation of a free market requires businesses to work very hard — in other words, compete — to earn your business. This works in favor of the consumer, not the producer. When producers are forced to compete to earn your business, they have to keep their costs down and produce their product or service better and cheaper than the others. This spreads the wealth in a way socialists can’t comprehend: It forces the producers to compete for the best workers, paying them more and keeping less for themselves, all while providing better products and services at lower prices, which increases the consumer’s own capital. This flattens the bell curve, don’t you know.
But if producers can instead use the power of government to squash competition and bail themselves out of bankruptcy, they tend to do so. Duh.
The Founders of the United States understood this. They knew that the power of government was dangerous to individual liberty; they created a government that was very limited in its ability to exercise power, precisely so it could not dispense the kind of favors we see it dispensing today. Government “stimulus” and bailouts are completely unconstitutional… but who cares?
Well, the Tea Party does. Evidently, the Occupiers don’t. I don’t expect to persuade many of them. They’ve been indoctrinated by the state, and you can’t expect the state to teach the very principles of liberty which are antithetical to its power.
The Occupiers would have you think that since the government stole once and gave to the banks, we should have it steal again and give the loot to the Occupiers so they can get free stuff, like college, cars, houses, shoes, lunches, whatever. All that does is make them thieves, like the banks, and us the victims of theft — again.
There’s a unbridgeable difference between us and them. They want to be the new beneficiaries of the government’s redistributive power. We want to abolish it.
The ultimate irony in the Occupiers’ position is that all while decrying the greed and corruption of capitalism, they seek to capitalize us. All economic systems are capitalistic; the battle is over what will be treated as a resource in the system. We who respect individual liberty treat only the land (and all its appurtenances) as the resource, but the government, its crony banks, and the Occupiers all treat people as a resource by taking our productivity by force to sustain themselves.
We in the Tea Party have only one option — the occupiers, ACORN, and the ruling elite must be defeated. The only way we can regain liberty is to reduce the scope and power of a government that has chosen to ignore its constitutional limitations.
If there’s any place this can be done, it’s here. If we don’t relight the beacon of liberty, the world will remain a dark place indeed.
For Liberty,
Manny Edwards
Sorry Manny, you just don’t get it. The occupy wall street movement is not anti-capitalism, it is not anti-bank, or anti-business. It is anti-bank-run-government, anti-corporation-run-government. If for five minutes, people like you could just sit down, shut up, and listen you would clearly see this. Sometimes having your head so far up your ass makes sitting uncomfortable. The occupiers do not want a bail out for themselves any more than they want a bailout for the banks. They, like the tea party, think that bailouts are theft. What they want is a participatory political system that does not FAVOR banks and corporations. Your puny intellect cannot understand this most critical of points because you blindly support the corporate run anti-participatory system. I wish you and your expertise in Freedom the best of luck. Someday, you will actually have freedom and it will be due to the Occupiers!
Really? The occupiers want less government and more liberty? Free markets? Less regulation? If that were the case, there’s no way the labor unions would be backing them. http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/nov/16/u… As always, follow the money.
It’s the Tea Party that wants to stop crony capitalism, taxing, spending, regulating, smothering us. You want liberty? Join the Tea Party. You want more Marxism, bailouts, and welfare? Join the occupiers.
Manny, I really am having a hard time understanding your position. The people occupying wall street are not necessarily protesting captilism. What most are protesting is a system that has seen the wealth of the top 1% increase by almost 300% in the last 30 years while the wealth of the remaining 99% has remained relatively flat. Understandably, they have chosen to protest on wall street because it was the banking system with the help of lax government policy that precipitated the economic collapse and recession of 2008. Granted, it was the governement backed Fanny & Freddy that guaranteed the loans that allowed banks to make these bad mortgages in the first place. It was government de-regulation of the banking industry that allowed them to take advantage of the system and issue securities they new were bad. AIG was a non-government business that simply sold insurance on the bad mortgages because they had AAA ratings from the independent ratings agencies. My point, there is plenty of blame to go around. The OWS movement is simply fed up with what they perceive as a system stacked against them. Out of curiosity, could you please give me one historical or modern example of your free market utopia in practice?
In the last 30 years education has gone up over 300 percent. You should be protesting academia "Occupy, the Coverage has been Comical" http://boogiefinger.blogspot.com/2012/03/occupy-c…
Occupy is a tool of the Global Elite, scripted by the likes of Joseph Stiglitz "Occupy Wall Street – Scripted by Global Banking Interests" http://boogiefinger.blogspot.com/2012/01/occupy-w…
Occupy is used to push for Global initiatives such as the Financial transaction tax http://www.cepr.net/documents/ftt-support.pdf :Occupy – Media – Elite University – Push Financial Transaction Tax: http://boogiefinger.blogspot.com/2012/02/occupy-m…
Only a republic can survive. We are not a "democracy," the word DOES NOT APPEAR IN THE CONSTITUTION. Occupy is a JOKE and FRAUD by any measure.
It’s the same fed up people. Different regions. Different perspectives on the same problem. It’s a populace movement called Occupy and Tea Party. The only thing the military industrial congressional complex has left over us is it’s ability to divide and conquer us: "Left VS. Right!" "Tea Party VS. Occupy!" "Crypts VS. Bloods!" I for one am tired of this trite and boring merry-go-round. It’s so old calling it a "paradigm" is giving it too much credit.
Sorry. There may be issues on which OWS and TP intersect, but we are not the same, nor is it a single "populace (sic — I believe the word you were groping for is "populist") movement". OWS is nihilistic at best, communistic at worst. The Tea Party is pro-capitalist and composed of people who reaffirm the basic verities and strengths of our nation. OWS lives in daddy’s basement, Tea Party people built the basement. OWS throws temper tantrums, the Tea Party organizes, campaigns and votes. OWS squats on public property, defecates on police vehicles, riots and countenances rape and drug use. The Tea Party observes the rule of law. In a nutshell: OWS is destructive, Tea Party is constructive.
Gov Workers Dont Pay Tax? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibUdmjheFVI&fe…. He needs 2 change 10K to $110K the Payrolltax limit X’s 3.5M Paid $180K+ __Many your video does not go far enough , look at how many in gov are exempt from the Payrolltax ,its only 3% to kick in for the taxpayer’s benifits ,but like in the Wisconsin battles they were only kicking in what 5% for theres ,I think the top rate gov employees kick in are 8% but lets just say its 15% that leaves 85% for the taxpayer to fund there retirement whats so bad about the 3% of what ever is over the $110K
We’ve been asleep at the wheel… all of us. "There’s plenty of blame to go around. …but all one needs to do to find the guilty is look into a mirror." – "V" from "V for Vendetta"__I myself (as a conservative) am totally sick of the same old, lame political game that’s being played on the American people. But we have lost our ability to govern ourselves. THAT is what we need to fight for. But it will take participation from everyone. I believe that should be the main point of Occupy.
I find an ultimate irony in you suggesting the OWS are simply useful idiots and should instead defect the tea party, who obviously are not.
Tea party or libertarian types have a sort of cognitive dissonance where they see the economy as divided into two ‘camps’: government and the private sector. Once the two combine, the failure is no longer one of ‘capitalism’ but falls into the ‘government’ category and is deemed as ‘outside’ the ‘free market.’
Here’s the problem: capitalism has always involved capitalists being in bed with the state. It did at its inception where legislation was used to separate peasants from their land and force them into wage labour, with awful conditions and low pay. Specific businesses have always enjoyed special favours: limited liability, patent law, direct subsidies, lucrative contracts in conjunction with public services. Even the New Deal had to be modified to gain the favour of business leaders. And now we have bailouts.
Capitalists don’t care if they use the state to advance their interests. As capitalism is a system characterised by increasing accumulation of profit, and by competition. Some will reap higher profits than others and they will be able to subvert democracy by using the state to advance their interests. As you rightly point out, the US started from a relatively clean slate, but this is what has happened.
The problem is not that OWS are ‘statists’ – you too are a statist, but only for laws of your approve of. Karl Marx made this point:
“Economists have a singular method of procedure. There are only two kinds of institutions for them, artificial and natural. The institutions of feudalism are artificial institutions, those of the bourgeoisie are natural institutions. In this they resemble the theologians, who likewise establish two kinds of religion. Every religion which is not theirs is an invention of men, while their own is an emanation from God. When the economists say that present-day relations – the relations of bourgeois production – are natural, they imply that these are the relations in which wealth is created and productive forces developed in conformity with the laws of nature. These relations therefore are themselves natural laws independent of the influence of time. They are eternal laws which must always govern society. Thus, there has been history, but there is no longer any. There has been history, since there were the institutions of feudalism, and in these institutions of feudalism we find quite different relations of production from those of bourgeois society, which the economists try to pass off as natural, and as such, eternal.” — K. Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy
You choose to ignore certain laws – limited liability, immigration restrictions, laws that define corporations, private property, contract law, and many more – and deem everyone who advocates laws you don’t approve politically a ‘statist.’ But you are a statist – the difference is these people want the state to act in the interests of the general populace rather than simply using the law to protect the most powerful, as it does with the laws outlined above.
There is no such thing as a ‘free market’ – there is no scientifically defined boundary at which point a law ‘interferes’ with the market and becomes an intervention. We can discuss the pros and cons of individual laws but trying to pass some off as unnatural is erroneous.
Far from being the useful idiots, the OWS crowd have it absolutely right: it is not about states and markets, but about the wealthy class – which includes landlords, politicians, financiers, central bankers and so forth – versus the ‘99%.’ What you advocate is removing things like public healthcare and social security, and through some sort of perverse logic you expect this will result in ‘smaller’ government, which will then suddenly stop doing bailing out banks and giving big pharma subsistence. Of course, that’s not what would happen; instead the rich and powerful would retain their influence, with slightly lower taxes no doubt, whilst what was left of the social safety net would disappear and people would suffer. It is the tea party who are the useful idiots, not OWS. This is why bankers and their ilk do not have the police beat tea partiers.
P.S. socialism has never really been about state control. It’s always been about worker ownership. At most the state ownership is a transitional period, and afterwards would be restricted to public goods/natural monopolies, as it should be under pretty much any system. It’s a shame socialism and communism are swear words to most Americans.
__ __ __ __ Occupy Wall Street You’ve All Been Had! __ __ __ __
Occupy Wall Street Alphabet News; Baked Non-Stories, Talking Head Schmooze;
Turning From Truth, Hiding The Clues, Licking Tide Toes On The Altar Of Dues.
Lawless Report?
Chaos Ensues?
Blinded Dereliction Of Duty They Choose.
In Chimed The Democrats: Rangel, Al Gore; Barney Frank, Kucinich Liked The Score.
Razed Fat Cat, Ripping His Store; Pretence Of Peaceful, UpLifting The Poor.
Deceitful, Their Tale.
Fallacious, Their Lore.
Their Own Fattened Wallets Just Scream For More!
Occupy Wall Street Defecating Fools; Marching, Barking, Zombie Tools,
Some Carried Messages We Know Were True, Then Came The Commies For Some Socialist Stew.
The Peaceful Start?
The Golden Rule?
Stabbed In The Heart By The Violent Ghouls!
In Waltzed Gimme’s, Obama’s Own Brine, Joined By The Nazis Who Twitter Just Fine.
Useful Idiots! Failure Sublime; Drums Pound Rhythm Of The Marxist Rhyme.
Conquer Divide?
Message Incline?
Communist Greed Says They’re Divine.
Occupy Wall Street Students Of Funk, Convoluted Messages, Honesty Flunk;
Lice Ridden Losers, Smart As A Puck; Profs Quack In Unison, Fee Height Cluck.
History Pap?
Give It A Dunk?
Floundering Mound-Pound Hocking Their Junk.
In Marched Union Thugs "Knee Cap Steak"; Grassroots Pelosi? Lessons In Fake!
Crime Ridden Murmurs Cover Up’R’ ape. Putrefied Movement Is Caught On Tape.
Helping The Man?
Helping To Rake?
Helping Themselves To Huge Portions Of Take.
Occupy Wall Street Violent Turns, Gone Are The Messages, Now It Just Burns.
Businesses Are Closing, Workers Sojourn; Silence From The Media, Truth’s Adjourn.
Capital Lost?
Not To Return?
Cloward And Piven Chants, Cauldron Churns!
In Creeps A S’S’aveor, Wolf In Sheep Clothes, Coming Insurrection Do You Suppose?
Mission Accomplished? Van Jones Close? What’s The Anti-Venom? And What’s The Dose?
Collective Good?
The Evil Rose?
Plotting For The End, Dropped The Radical Pose!
Occupy Wall Street You’ve All Been Had! Rich Ones And Homeless This Ending Is Bad.
Propaganda Photo-Ops Hollywood’s Band, Stopped For A Minute, Then Fly To Sun Sand.
Oh, Did They Care?
While Off They Gad?
Retrogression Squalor, You’re Their Passing Fad!
by joachim 11/11/11
★ ★ Long Live The Peaceful Respectful Clean Tea Party! ★ ★