Bikini Politics

The Mixed Strategery of Occupation

Wherever Occupy Wall Street says it will go, there go hundreds if not thousands of police officers.  If Occupy Wall Street were a confrontational organization bent on occupying space, or more directly, limiting access to institutions like the stock exchange, or more generally disrupting people's commute (as they appear to be planning to do in DC), it seems to me they'd just have to announce that they would be there.  The ensuing police presence would certainly create an obstacle, even if the protesters never showed.

But, as my friend Mrs. E points out, it's not really about blocking anything or limiting access or anything so shrewd.  Which is why the protesters need to appear in person: It's about being photographed.

If your goal is to be photographed confronting a police officer while holding a sign about how "We are the 99%," the most important thing is to stage your visual dramatically.  Maybe you extend out your arms, weep a little if you can manage, this kind of thing.  It appears the strategy is that these pictures will persuade the hard-hearted among us to join up with the cause. But if your strategy is one focused on persuasion, you need to also not make people hate you just to get a good picture.  Protests in parks are one thing -- few people are disrupted, you can just walk around.  It allows each protestor to convince him or herself that he or she is making a difference, while they seek out a reporter or blogger to take their picture and watch them playing at rebellion.  

But blockading a busy thoroughfare is not a message of suasion, it's a confrontational message.  The strategy, ultimately, is confused. Do they want me to hate them, or love them? Are they wide-eyed collectivists or cynical anarchists?  Are they an unstable amalgam of both? And is this discord in strategy a sign that perhaps things are falling, finally, apart?

Wherein I agree with OWS, only a little.

I've often cast aspersions on the OWS movement.  Thoughtful aspersions, mostly, emphasizing my disagreement with what they appeared to be trying to stand for, but some less thoughtful aspersions as well. I read a friend's account of the clearing of Zuccotti Park today, and he mentioned that the Occupiers chanted, "This is what a police state looks like." And on that, I do have to strongly disagree.  In a police state, dissenters like the Occupiers would have been jailed or killed for expressing their views as strongly and overtly as they did.  In fact, in a regular non-police state they might still be in jail for trespassing, disturbing the peace, using drugs, and the violent crimes we've heard about.  But here in America, we err on the side of free speech and there they were for a few months, camped out in Zuccotti park, stinking up the joint (see what I said about less-thoughtful aspersions? that was one).

But at the same time that I disagree we live in a police state, we may be coming closer to a redistributive one.  And here is where I can relate a bit to OWS' outrage.  Public corruption is never acceptable, and these days we have become almost comically blase about those who have taken liberties with the public trust and the public fisc (Rod Blagojevich on celebrity apprentice!?!). And corruption is even more dangerous when our government becomes larger, and the policies of the administration become bolder.  With fewer and fewer funds to pay for this increasingly totalizing vision, and a public ambivalence towards corruption, where are we headed but a confiscatory and non-accountable state? This is part of what happens when we shift from ensuring equality of opportunity to attempting to ensure equality of outcome.  And this is my main area of disagreement with OWS: the goal of the state cannot be to ensure equality of outcome for all.*

*(And if you haven't re-read Harrison Bergeron in a while, now's the time! Go on, it's short.)

I have no personal problem with the fact that a small group of people make an immense amount of money.  If one day I'm graced with an idea or skill that I could monetize like that, you bet I would.  And we all feed into the success of the successful: we buy their products, use their services, and even work in the jobs they create.  But jealousy is not a policy platform.  I don't get to knock down people who are good at capitalism, even if I'm bad at it. 

People say "life's not fair," and maybe they're right in terms of the vagaries of fortune seeming occasionally unjust (or cruel... see, e.g., cancer).  But life is America is fair in one key sense: whatever modicum of talent you were born with, you will be able to use for your own purposes, to carry yourself as far as you can.  The state will keep you out of abject poverty with social support programs like welfare and housing subsidies and food stamps, but beyond that we stand back.  And though this is not equal, it is fair: none of us can know ex ante what gifts we might be born with, but surely none of us would choose to limit the most brilliant among us, holding back progress and growth, in order to make sure that the least gifted among us need not be jealous (limiting an individual is part of why racial discrimination is so stupid--you could be holding back immense potential...what if Einstein was black?).  Imagine if great innovators like Steve Jobs were told from the start that because their colleagues might be jealous, they could not benefit from their innnovations or share them with the marketplace.  I have a hard time imagining that such a base drive as jealousy could really be the motive for effective public policy.*

*(And before you tell me my policies are based on greed, let me just say that greed is a distinctly solitary vice but wealth cannot be generated in a vacuum.)

So while OWS is right, that public corruption is incredibly dangerous, and that we should be skeptical of the way that power is distributed by the government, the problem is not that it could be distributed better - the problem is that power and economic success are being *distributed* at all.  

If the federal government had not impaired the functioning of the free market by hepling create the housing bubble, and propping up the current student loan bubble, picking winners and losers in the market (albeit perhaps with the best intentions), perhaps the protesters in Zuccotti Park would have had jobs to go to.

A Real Answer on Student Loans

The President recently announced that, under his new program, student loan payments will be no more than 10% of your disposible income.  I was sure that I, as a first year associate at a large law firm, wouldn't qualify for such leniency-- but apparently, I do!  They'd like to lower my loan payments.  How kind.  

This is just another perpetual debt trap, and students caught with massive student loan debt should not fall for it.  The President's plan is functionally an offer to let you make "minimum payments" on your debt for the next 25 years, as the high, fixed interest rate continues to work its magic.  

Instead of letting loan recipients spiral into perpetual debt, it is time to support a real plan to help people do the responsible thing and pay their debt.  This is why, instead of offering this specious program, the President should support a modification of the tax code to allow loan recipients to make loan payments out of pretax dollars.  This program should be uncapped, available to anyone regardless of income, and put into place immediately.  Because there is no cap, it incentivizes aggressive repayment by allowing you to repay yourself into a lower tax bracket.

This program does what a responsible government should do: reward good behavior, namely, repayment of loans.  The President's current program, in contrast, just extends the prerogative of perpetual indebtedness to the individual American, where it was previously the exclusive prerogative of the government.

Student loans are obscene.  My USAA credit card interest rate is only slightly higher than the fixed rate on my federal student loans.  My USAA credit card is in the last position in a bankruptcy and might never recover if I default, but student loans are non-dischargeable.  The interest rate on student loans is price gouging, a lulu from the government to itself.  This arrangement is downright abusive: if student loans continue to be nondischargeable, their interest rate ought to be capped at 5%.

But that's a big suggestion, and might take some time.  So I'll go back to my small suggestion: student loan payments should come out of pretax dollars.  

Make it happen. Now.