There really isn’t any rational debate about this, the OWS crowd are economically illiterate. They don’t understand our capitalist system or the role that our financial markets play in it. They don’t understand how regulation created the derivatives markets or how the political demands of Congress were the real cause of the mortgage bond crisis. They are in a word, imbeciles.
Their entire world view (if they can be said to have a cohesive one) is based entirely on envy. They want the government to seize the wealth of the 1% wealthiest Americans and redistribute it to the rest. How do they justify this government authorized theft? According to them the wealthiest 1% is 'greedy' and that's justification enough.
We’ve heard a lot about “Greedy Wall Street” from the political right as well over the last few years. There are a great many people on the right who don’t understand how people on Wall street make so much, and can't reconcile themselves to the fact that the vast majority of them do it within the law. They don’t understand the service offered and therefore don’t think of it as a ‘real’ product.
Go to Freerepublic and you’ll hear them complaining that the people on Wall Street should quit being ‘paper pushers’ and go do something 'real'. They’ll talk about how CEO’s don’t deserve the big packages they receive, even if they don’t know the first thing about what it takes to do that job. They think it was capitalism’s failure that cause the market crisis instead of the politicians that broke the market by expecting unrealistic politically motivated outcomes.
So hopefully that portion of the political right will learn from the occupy Wall Street people how silly they sound. Hopefully they’ll come to appreciate that the vast majority of people on ‘Wall Street’ provide an honest service for an honest fee. Hopefully they'll feel a little less comfortable in ridiculing them simply because they don't understand what they do. And hopefully they’ll learn that more regulation (like the ones the OWS crowd are calling for) won’t solve their problems.
The truth is, if we want the benefits of capitalism to flow down to the people at the bottom of the economic ladder, then it’s not a question preventing business from interfering in government, it’s a question of getting government to stop interfering in business. Eliminate government imposed regulatory barriers that prevent new players from entering an industry, and competition will do the rest.
That’s how it was before too big to fail. And it’s how it would be again if we prevent government from getting too involved. Less government, not more is the real key.
1 comments:
I heard a report on Bloomberg radio the other morning, which for me illustrates the true nature of the ascending regulatory state. S&P 500 companies are presently outspending others by a substantial margin, especially smaller businesses. "Liberalism," is a trojan horse used by larger interests to attack the competition by restricting access to capital. Sarbanes-Oxley is a perfect expamle - you need to structure your small company just like Enron, in order to do a public offering. Other examples are legion.
So for me it is not a question of who interfered with who first. It is more how do you "package," in a marketing sense, that "liberalism" is the sharpest tool of big ___________ (Insert noun here - for example, banks, business, Wall Street, Holywood, unions, education, bannanna republics., etc., etc.,).
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