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.
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