Reply To: Occupy Wall Street – Are you with it?

OWS is oftencompared to the Arab Spring. It has good intenions and it is against bad things. Many people are jumping on the band wagon to support being against something bad. The possibility of it having the power to destroy the status quo leaves open the question of whether that which replacesit is better or worse as it seems very possible to be going south in Tunsia, Egypt, and Libya. Will the power of the movement be owned by a few powerful leaders who fuel their own power from it?

One thing that is so overlooked by the OWS crowd is that this system is the one that generated the most wealth for the masses, including the lowest tiers of our society, in the history of the world. If it is to be wrecked and rebuilt, it would be foolish to replace it with one of the lesser achieving systems in place throughout the rest of the world or throughout history for that matter. What is the replacement? If it is enforcement of existing laws, it is not the system that is broken.

The system is not broken. It is the politicians who have incrementally tweaked it to serve themselves through special interest groups and campaign financing. Wall Street is playing the game with the rules set up by politicians and with the politicians chosing which ones to enforce and which ones not to. The same holds true with imigration, voter registration, tax collection, energy rebates, Obamacare waivers, location of protected lands, zoning regulations, ……

The scary thing is that the consensus of the OWS people seems to be that the government (politicians) should step in and take over these private institutions of which they are responsible for corrupting. What has the government ever taken over and made better? This is the exact type of circumstance that allows politicians to empower themselves to gain more from special interests whose fate they control. The result, if OWS gets their way, will be more corruption rather than less, although their leaders may become one of the benefitted special interest groups in the process. If the individuals supporting OWS become the beneficiaries of corruption, will they be blind to that fact? 

Will the money they have now raised become “lobbying” money, donations for candidates who will put tax dollars in their hands, ….