Occupy Wall Street, pt. 1: The Good, the Bad…

In the last couple of weeks, I’ve spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to understand and engage with the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement and protestors. Something about them rung really true and connected with some deep concerns of mine (and most Americans, I believe), while some other aspects that seemed to violate common sense and/or our governing principles of liberty and justice for all. However, after seeing the tea party ridiculed as tea baggers by our politicians and mainstream media, I didn’t want to fall into the trap of marginalizing or caricaturing this movement. I want to understand it. And if this represents an flowering populist power, well…I always want to speak truth to power.

One way to summarize my analysis of them is to say that I share a lot of their gripes and concerns. Their “felt needs” are hard to argue against:  unemployment, corporate greed, government inadequacy, a screwed up healthcare system, lackluster education, mortgage defaults, clean energy, and environmental assurances…just to name a few. However, recognizing symptoms doesn’t equal a proper diagnosis. And a good diagnosis is a prerequisite for determining the best means of treatment…for finding a cure for what ails us. It’s at this point that I believe the movement falls far short and in fact could do much more harm than good if it or its sentiments gain traction in the political will of our voting population. In fact, I believe that philosophically, many of these people have more in common with the corporate interests they’re railing against than they realize…as I explain at the end of this article.

There are two common, fundamental concerns that I hear expressed by this movement that I’d like to address, and unfortunately they’re too complex and inexhaustible cover comprehensibly…let alone in one (lengthy) article. So I’ll start here by affirming the point that I hope is taken from this movement—the realization that powerful corporations have colluded with government officials for their mutual benefit in violation of the people’s interests.

I appreciate anyone who calls attention to this devastating reality. But if this is the symptom, what is the cause? Fareed Zakaria, in the latest issue of Time Magazine, cited John McCain, pointing “to the tax code as the foundation for the corruption of American politics.” He went on to say:

“Special interests pay politicians vast amounts of cash for their campaigns, and in return they get favorable exemptions or credits…in other countries, this sort of bribery takes place with cash in envelopes, but in America it is institutionalized and legal, but it is the same—cash for politicians in return for favorable treatment from government. The U.S. tax system is not simply corrupt; it is corrupt in a deceptive manner that has degraded the entire system of American government….The simplest way to get the corruption out of Washington is to remove the prize that members of Congress give away: preferential tax treatment. A flatter tax code with almost no exemptions does that.”

Fareed and I don’t always see eye-to-eye, but on this he is exactly right…expressing views that align perfectly with those of the tea party and, most recently, Texas Governor Rick Perry (among others). George Will argued that with ethics laws and media scrutiny, politics are actually more clean than they’ve ever been, legally-speaking, but only because this aspect has been white-washed by both parties. He says that such “rent-seeking” is the natural consequence of the liberal administrative state “when government decisions allocate great wealth and opportunity, great wealth will be spent on influencing government decision-making.” This is no less natural than water flowing downhill; you can’t legislate the humanity out of people. If money is paper power, people will leverage their power to promote their interests. Mancur Olson noted this phenomenon in The Rise and Decline of Nations, recognizing that as a country becomes increasingly dominated by organized interest groups, it loses economic vitality and falls into decline. This is due to the consolidation of power between government and corporations and the games they must play to keep their balance of power intact.

But tax policy—primarily over income and profits—is just one area where politicians have shown favoritism and wrestled power away from the people. They play a similar game by manipulating production and markets through regulatory power. Originally intended to maintain justice and free commerce, this ever-expanding government power favors certain companies or causes who lobby or contribute for regulations (or targeted deregulation) that favors them over others. Even when the intent if admirable—such as important environmental standards or Obama’s newest proposal for mortgage rate reductions—there are companies who will capitalize (not based on free market forces, but government intervention). And of course there are always unintended consequences to such unnatural intervention…which ironically leads to more calls for government to fix the messes that they’ve created.

If special interests are as distasteful to the left as they claim it is, they would be even more leery of empowering and expanding regulatory power. But the opposite is true; more regulations are exactly what statists and OWS are arguing for…in addition to higher taxes (which take money/power from people and put it in the government’s control). This proves that the goal is not disempowering the government/corporate conglomerate for the public interest (and non-coincidentally, for promotion of liberty and justice), but rather shifting the power away from corporations to more government. With power-broking as the goal, the lesser of the two evils, they must believe, is our democratically-elected government that surely has our best interests at heart…whereas corporations have no heart.

The beauty of democracy is the equal power that our vote shares with everyone else’s. But with capitalism, another great source of power is the dollar, and the distribution of those is anything but equal. No one disputes this fact, but is that reality proof that it is not just? If all people are created equal with equal opportunity, then shouldn’t we all share in our nation’s prosperity equally? Without getting into how poorly this idealistic economic philosophy has fared practically in other socialist experiments around the world and recent history, let’s get right down to it—it’s not fair. People are not the same, their situations are not the same, and their outcome is not the same. It may seem like a noble intent to level not only the playing field but the score and give everyone a trophy while we’re at it, what will that really accomplish? Liberty is overrun by power as it reduces freedom to fairness and self-determination to social welfare.

These lesser ideals require an authority to decide what is fair and what is good for everyone else—what you should be allowed to produce and what you deserve to keep—and impose that on the people. This results in dampened incentive to achieve potential productivity, and the degradation of one’s humanity as a free agent. By contrast, our founding ideals of liberty and justice begin with what our creator has blessed us with (an affirmation of the unique people we are), protect us all equally with laws (to eliminate impediments for success), and reward hard work and productivity (with maximized prosperity for all who contribute).

Democracy does not vindicate oppression. If 51% of the population votes to enslave 49%, does that make it right? It might make it legal, but it does not make it just. Similarly, for 51% of the population to vote themselves out of the responsibility to pay taxes—or to punish successful businesses and force them to pay a certain amount or hire or whatever the populist wishes might be—it does not make it morally right. Whether you democratically elect that authority or claim it at gunpoint and establish a politburo—if you empower it to make these decisions—you take away the power of the individual with every law and regulation. The reason our founders were wise enough to separate the church’s authority from the government is not because morality isn’t important, it was so that no authority would be able to impose its morality on a free people.

Our government was established to protect every person’s liberty, not to ensure every person’s success. An authoritative, intervening state violates the former to promise the latter—a promise it has always and will always fail to deliver. Yet it continues to double-down by consolidating more power than votes alone can supply, so politicians turn to dollars. Dollars, of course, are amoral objects literally made to represent the interests of those who possess them, whereas our representatives are morally-bound to uphold our constitution (which limits their powers) and represent our interests, not their own…or any particular interests, for that matter. If your interest is in your politician’s power to grant you special benefits or advantages—if you’re more concerned with voting in your own self-interest than in the interest of liberty and justice—you are a part of the problem and not the solution, whether you are occupying wall street or lobbying for corporate loop-holes. Laws that grant special tax exemptions or regulatory burdens, like those that grant special benefits or redistribute wealth, are unjust because they show favoritism. They will inevitably lead to corruption—not corruption of wall street’s profit motive, but corruption that our laws can scarcely protect us against within the political process itself. This is the greatest miscarriage of justice, and thus the greatest threat to our freedom.

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