Occupy Wall Street Thread Reposted

The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. Cliché, sure, but it's also more true than at any time since the Gilded Age.
The poor are getting poorer, wages are falling behind inflation, and social mobility is at an all-time low.
If you're in that top 1%, life is grand.

Normalized to 1979, the top 1% have seen their share of America's income more than double. The bottom 90% have seen their portion shrink.

"The People" were stupid enough to take the loans.

and, the taxpayer loans have been paid back.

What's really sad is both the Repubes or the DRats haven't proposed a balanced budget for any point in the future.

You can sum up the "manifesto" of the 99%ers in three main statements:

1. I am absolutely entitled to be happy, stress free, anxiety free, perfectly healthy, well-rested, and entertained every waking minute of my life, and if I can't pay for these things myself (for whatever reasons, including laziness and incompetence on my part) it is the responsibility of everyone else to do so.

2. If anything happens that all of these conditions aren't met, then it is the primary police, regulatory, and tax-policy responsibility of government - and the primary obligation of taxpayers - to see that they are restored immediately.

3. If these things aren't restored immediately, then I will use whatever means -- electoral or violent -- to smash anyone or any business who is better off than I am.

My response to these as follows:

1. There is no right to happiness. Only its pursuit. You are not entitled to a materially excellent, stress free, exciting life. Nobody who has ever lived is entitled to this. When you adopt the attitude that it is ultimately the responsibility not of yourself but of some agency outside of yourself to provide you with material satisfaction and happiness and freedom from anxiety, you void your humanity. The default condition of humans throughout millions of years of history is hungry, stressed, and in need of sleep. Until the past few decades in the Western and Westernized world and with a free market, capitalistic system, this is how most people lived. The capitalist system you all seem to hate also had some of this stress and is far from perfect, but it is the only one that gave people an opportunity (not a guarantee, an OPPORTUNITY) to do something about it. It's not my fault that your politically correct history teachers imbued with leftist agendas failed to teach you any of this, or that your demagoguing leftist politicians were dishonest about what were historical norms in terms of what to expect out of life.

2. The primary purpose of government is to guarantee civil rights (negative rights, not positive economic ones), be an impartial judge in civil matters, provide equal access to energy and commerce, and then get the hell out of the way and let people sink or soar based upon their native skills, work ethic, and the value of their particular work at whatever the existing level of technology might be. Period. It is NOT to make sure that you have enough money for all the trinkets and outward signs of success and status. Not to free up money that you would have spent on medical care so you can have a new car by taking that medical money from your neighbor who earns more than you do. Not to put in regulations which guarantee your job security and income security at bulletproof levels. We've had governments that are like that in the last hundred years or so. Review them and their histories and their human rights legacy and then decide which is best, that way or this one.

3. It's true that there was much malfeasance on Wall Street. The bad actors should go to jail. But everyone on Wall Street isn't bad, and Wall Street is only a tiny fraction of the business community. It is insanity to paint all business people with a broad brush as you do and want to crush them with protests and support politicians who promote a ridiculous level of regulation. Smash business and your wealthier neighbors and you will destroy any opportunity for yourself. Everyone can't have a good paying public sector job with great benefits where you don't have to work very hard and can retire at 58. And what jobs there are that are like that will not be increasing in number as time goes by, given the obvious failure of the big-government welfare/nanny/hyperregulatory state. Success in the private sector requires that you learn to manage stress. That you purge envy from your life. Learn to multitask. Learn to work within a hierarchy even if you aren't at the top. Learn that your are valuable to your boss if you need to be told how to do something only once and learn and retain it forever (something you would certainly demand if you were boss). Learn that you may have to move and make other sacrifices in order to be somewhere where your skills are in demand. Learn that you may not get all the material things you want quickly and at once. Learn to be happy with whatever pay rate your neighbors and community have decided your labor or product is worth on a free market . The very fact that you're in this protest and failing to thrive, and that other young people are doing well and happy with less education and even lower pay than you, is prima facie evidence that you have not learned at least one and possibly several of these necessary things. It's not the fault of George Bush or businesspeople or devout Christians or Republicans - or Democrats, even. It's your own deficits, or your own stubbornness.

Beyond these specific things, there are other points I would make.

Your anger and efforts would be better directed at the (largely government) education system. In this you have been ill-served. It is overpriced, staffed primarily with people who aren't there to be excellent but to get thirty years of guaranteed pay and a pension, who are not at all averse to using the bully pulpit they possess to propagandize instead of teach and conveniently forget to mention aspects of philosophies or historical facts that blow holes in their narrative, and their marketing of their services with respect to ultimate financial expectations has been largely dishonest. If you didn't fit in exactly to their expectations or were difficult to teach they would put you on Ritalin or some other drugs. That said, nobody forced you to go deeply into debt for an "education" that is more often an indoctrination with no guarantees of a marketable skill.

Likewise, your parents did you no favors. They had you play soccer in leagues that didn't keep score and gave trophies to all the teams regardless of how good or bad they were, shielding you from the concept of winning and losing, the notion that not everyone has the same skill set, and the idea that actions have consequences. They supported the notion of getting rid of class rank for valedictorian, got rid of physical education and home economics and recess. They filled you with the poisonous notion of outcome egalitarianism, the greatest lie of all.

The minute you were "unhappy" your parents brought you to the doctor and put you on happy pills. They bubble wrapped you so you would never be hurt or suffer consequences for bad actions or words. They insisted you go to college instead of getting a trade because they wanted to impress everyone with how awesome they were as parents as evidenced by sending all their kids to college.

Your media and information industry failed you, getting you to think that supporting Obama in 2008 was a blow against Wall Street by not reporting that Wall Street gave him five times more money than McCain. Protesting Wall Street but not Obama is illogical but understandable if you aren't aware of his campaign finance connections. (If you know about them and are still protesting Wall Street but not Obama, you're a hypocrite.)

However, your biggest failure is to yourself. Whatever people or circumstances led you to believe that you deserve to have perfect, stress free happiness and everything you wanted or the government would get it for you, they were wrong, and so are you. Want to be successful and ultimately happy? You'll need to learn that you will have to sacrifice much in the short term. You'll be best friends with the concept of delayed gratification. You'll have to learn to deal with high stress levels, lack of sleep, and lack of material status among peers, not for a few hours or a day or two but for weeks or months or years. You'll learn to exist not being fully happy for extended times in your life -- without happy pills. You'll learn that there are things in life that make you happy like religion, community, volunteer work, and so many other things that have nothing to do with pay.

You'll learn to deal with all of this with dignity and a sense of humor, not pouty aggrieved entitlement.

Or you'll fail utterly and cosmically deserve to fail, regardless of what happens to Wall Street.

Occupying Wall Street isn't the solution.