Forum Post: Occupy Wall Street: A Story without Heroes
Posted 12 years ago on Oct. 4, 2011, 11:32 a.m. EST by darrenlobo
(204)
This content is user submitted and not an official statement
Although there is no single ideology uniting the movement, it does seem to have a general philosophical thrust, and not a very good one at that. OccupyWallStreet.org has a list of demands, and while the website does not represent all of the protesters, one could safely bet that it lines up with the views of most of them: A "living-wage" guarantee for workers and the unemployed, universal healthcare, free college for everyone, a ban on fossil fuels, a trillion dollars in new infrastructure, another trillion in "ecological restoration," racial and gender "rights," election reform, universal debt forgiveness, a ban on credit reporting agencies, and more power for the unions. Out of over a dozen demands there is only one I agree with — open borders — and, ironically, many on Wall Street probably favor that as well.
All in all, this wish list is a terrible recipe for moving far down the road toward socialism. On the way to achieving these goals, totalitarian controls on the population would be necessary. Some of these demands are merely horrible ideas that would injure the economy severely — such as the huge expansion of public infrastructure. But others are so fancifully utopian — such as a living wage guaranteed to all, especially when combined with free immigration — that their attempted implementation would confront the many disasters and horrors we have seen in every nation that has seriously attempted socialism. Such policies would vastly expand the government, including its manifestations in the corporate state and police power that these protesters find so unsavory. All of the corruption and brutality they think they oppose are symptoms of the same essential political ideology they favor.
http://mises.org/daily/5746/Occupy-Wall-Street-A-Story-without-Heroes
The socialists amuse anon.
You berate us in college for being some master class while exploiting us and denigrating us, so that some pretend-hippies and hipsters can hook-up and be all SWPL and slowly turn into the eventual yuppies we've come to know and hate. While of course ignoring any real message of what love truly is, or what being truly is, to have some sort of retro-experience.
Meanwhile anon was sitting trading hentai with other anon and jerking off to Touhou.
The real anon know that no side favors them, and only seeks to use them to further some sort of retarded goal by extracting and farming out any value from their lives.
Socialism? PFFT... you aren't talking to the real anon.
This is a good start, but you need to go the head your screaming at the monsters feet. wall street starts at K street .
The Communist Corporatist System is ran by the family's that have worked in the bureaus that we can't elect. these are the same family's that have worked there from the beginning and if you think that they don't have family in the DOD your wrong.
Oh, OWS' demands are silly, but a belief in 'free-market' capitalism (i.e. feudalism) isn't? Please.
voluntary exchange and private property, oh no! Scary....lol
This is a silly hit piece.
"Just as important, these protesters fail to understand that the market economy that they want the state to conquer is the principal engine of prosperity."
He is specifically referring to financial engineering, derivatives, options, fraudulent CDOs, etc. All of which not only produces no wealth but does a tremendous amount to prevent the economy from reaching full productivity by destabilizing sound banks and good lending practices.
One thing that the left often doesn't get is that there is a big difference between the present, corporatist system & a free market, laissez faire. We advocate the latter. People who advocate regulation & taxation don't realize that they are enabling the former. In other words you're being played. The corporations & elites in this country like the left advocating an empowered govt because they know they can control it.
I advocate sensible regulation alongside the arrests of the Rothschilds, Warburgs, Goldmans, Sachs, Lazards, etc.
Stop pretending we can't do both.
No pretense, sensible regulation is like hot ice, there is no such thing. Regulators are under the control of the industries they regulate. That's why big business doesn't fight them. For example, you don't hear the pharma companies calling for the end of the FDA, do you?
Bullshit. The regulators are under the control of the owners of the Fed right now, but that is what we are going to change. I completely agree that most regulation serves an anti-competitive function as it stands now. On the other hand, you're a fool to deny that good regulations can exist. How about we legalize (deregulate) the dumping of benzene in your water? No?
The way to protect the environment is the protection of property. That used to work until the state decided that industrialization was a good thing. At that point the courts stopped upholding the nuisance laws that people had been using to stop polluters. Once again, the govt isn't protecting us it is hurting us.
More to the point, all laws are regulatory in a sense. Why don't we legalize murder? Oh, that's right, because the state has a role in regulating behavior.
Here you're confusing legality with regulation. Regulation is based on the idea that the govt can act in a proactive way, a guilty until proven innocent approach So making murder illegal isn't regulation because we don't have murder inspectors going around asking people about their intentions & checking in advance to see if they look like they're going to murder someone. Minority Report http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0181689/ comes to mind. That's the concept that regulation is based on. This kind of pre crime approach is a violation of people's rights & as you have agreed widely abused. You should know better than to advocate things that have failed.
Actually no. He's referring to free market capital investment and production. mises.org has LONG pointed out the terrible financial system we have and why it's bad.
End The Fed
Do you really want to end the fed?
How do you propose that the USA continue to function in a world economy where other central banks retain printing presses and the ability to instigate runs on our domestic banks, manipulate their currencies to destroy our industry, etc.?
Nationalize the fed.
Errr don't have fractional reserve banking? Then there can be no runs on banks. Or just let the banks deal with it, I'm sure they can look after themselves. They're big boys.
It is a common fallacy that having a week currency is good for domestic industries. It is bad for everyone holding the currency and good for everyone who doesn't.
Industry is built on capital investment and a stable future outlook. Expanding the money supply damages both of these and is the reason for recessions and depressions.
Yes. Ending The Fed will do very little unless we end or at least curtail fractional reserve practices. The little we could still allow (for liquidity) would pay interest directly to the the US Treasury.
So you don't think there should be such a thing as a loan?
Because loans require fractional reserves of less than 1. Dropping the fraction less than 1 is precisely how you get the money out the door for the loan.
look, I believe that fractional reserves aren't a problem if there are competetive currencies and no monopoly in money issuance
but what you're saying is false. You CAN have loans with 100% reserves. They come from time deposits. There are less of them, because you don't loan out what is on an demand deposit, but if someone makes a time deposit for, say, one year, he loans it out for one year
Other bcountries don't hold the reserve currency
Not now, but they will if we end the fed rather than nationalizing it and making the policy more rationalize and geared towards helping Americans rather than European financiers who own and operate it now.
Why help Americans over Europeans? That's a but unjust isn't it? To each his own?
Americans over European financiers. I'm 100% behind a rising tide lifting the boats of the 99.9% that were not born into families owning the central banks.
Let the Europeans have the ECzb and the Americans can have the fed to each his own
The Europeans don't even want the ECB. Germans are pushing heavily to withdraw from the monetary union. England was smart enough never to join. It's just another tool of the same kleptomaniac elite.
Agreed. A gold standard would fix things right again. People have been fooled too long.
No, gold standard is retarded. Gold was used for precisely two reasons in the past: (1) No one figured out alchemy and (2) gold wasn't used for anything else (jewelry, granted, but that is vanity not a productive commodity)
Today we have sophisticated anti-counterfeit measures that remove the first concern and it is a lot cheaper to print money than dig gold out the ground.
Exactly why you have today's mess. They did figure out alchemy, it's called a printing press.
Right, printing press is alchemy more or less. But this whole question of a gold standard does nothing more than obfuscate the real issue, which is that we have a private cartel issuing themselves free money. That's what we need to stop.
With regulation? Or with the rules of physics? There's a reason gold works as a stable money supply, no one legislated it to be money. The gold standard is the issue.
I'm ok with Congress printing money. Deflation isn't good and you want a growing monetary base with a growing economy.
When you have adept based economy, it has to grow. Do not be ok with printing money or you will be protesting same time every year.
Nationalize The Fed.......sort of. But a lot of the criminals currently at The Fed need to be washed out. However, I agree that the issuance of currency should be the sole providence of the government. The trick is to set up an independent and transparent monetary board as a 4th branch that doesn't answer to any other branch of government except the supreme court.
I disagree. The economy (and money) are inherently political issues. This idea that the Fed needs to be apolitical has just been a sly way of the banksters saying "fuck you" to the will of the American people.
It would/could still be political. They have to be picked somehow. They'd either have to be voted in or picked by governors of the states. But it should be a separate branch.
They'd have to figure out how much money the government could spend without causing inflation. Plus, how much the government HAS to spend to keep liquidity up. It will be a tricky thing. Letting that monetary board be pestered by Congress would not serve us so well. However, if we don't like what the board is doing--vote them out, or vote out whoever put them in place.
The Constitution specifically designates the power of the purse and the power to regulate the value of money to Congress. It's fine to have oversight committees nominated and voted on by Congress, but ultimately this power has to residue in the hands of our elected representatives and therefore us.
Hello,I am a journalist from China national radio. May I have intereview with you?
I'm always up for an interview.
Hello,I am a journalist from China national radio. May I have intereview with you?
Pick someone with something to say Shirley.
We need more socialism and control on how people spend their money. Each person should be limited to what they can buy and how much they can spend on products like TV's, Cars, Iphones and food, if people can be forced to control their spending then all of us can be happy.
Isn't this advocating the police state that would be needed to enforce your low spending scheme? Quick, have the swat team raid that house, they bought an extra bag of potato chips!
Surely this ones a joke? Yes? There are so many stupid people on this forum my sarcasm radar is giving me mixed messages......
No this is not a joke, if we can control what people spend like those Wall Street Bankers, they can then support us all!!!
No, come on, you're toying with my vulnerable radar, you can't be serious?
Seriously I can see Russia from my house and it doesn't look like socialism worked there
It didn't work in Guyana either:
Socialism in Guyana
Imagine for a moment what life would be like if you had to queue up at every grocery store just to get basic food items for your family. While you’re standing in line, your palms get sweaty , your heart pounds hard against your chest. Waiting to get to the point of sale seems like an eternity. While in line, your fear intensifies with every step forward to the counter. Your fear is that you would have spent several hours in line only to be turned away at the counter with the dreaded words, 'sorry, come back next week. We just ran out of ….' For many, this is a difficult scenario to comprehend, but for my generation and that of my parents, this was reality during the 70’s and 80’s in Guyana, South America when we lived under the dictatorship of Linden Forbes Sampson Burnham, the first President of this small South American country of only 83,000 square miles and a population of under one million people.
Read more at: http://theinternationallibertarian.blogspot.com/2009/12/socialism-in-guyana.html
Booyeah good work señor lobo
Why do you think it is a joke? Capitalism enslaves the poor, we have to control these people so we do can enjoy the fruits of our labor.
No, corporatism enslaves just like socialism. Under both there are no property rights. No one owns the fruits of their labor, they're all slaves.
Free market capitalism can only exist where property rights are protected. That's the only way to enjoy the fruits of one's labor.
Hahaha have you ever been to a socialist country? Listen to your own words! You are two types of crazy if you think making other people do what you want is healthy.... Heads up you have never seen capitalism, you are too young. Despite what Michael Moore says
Social justice and socialism are two different things, work out which one you really want
Soon all of you Capitalist pigs will fall to your knees as socialism takes over. I am proud that Mr. Obama is our First of many Socialist Leaders who will lead us to victory.
So agressive... Didn't mummy tuck you into bed as a child? Mr Obama couldn't lead a dance, if you are waiting on him, I'm afraid you will be long gone before you take over. Save yourself some time, move to a socialist country, you have about the right IQ