In an OWS World...

If you agree with OWS that more government control over the economy is the answer, then you must be willing to accept more Solyndras, more Fannie and Freddie failures, and more bailouts of businesses, banks and unions, as they gamble with your money.  


The result will be less entrepreneurship resulting in more expensive goods and services, lower wages, higher taxes and a lower standard of living.

Mark Steyn explains...

My colleague Rich Lowry correctly notes that many of the beleaguered families on the "We are the 99%" websites have real problems.

However, the "occupy" movement has no real solutions, except more government, more spending, more regulation, more bureaucracy, more unsustainable, lethargic pseudo university with no return on investment, more more more of what got us into this hole. (Mark Steyn)

Indeed. Unrepentant capitalist Charles Gasparino reminds us that capitalism's predations on the proletariat are mere trifles when compared to the serial Marxist miseries that have stained humanity and snuffed liberty and the light of reason while slaughtering hundreds of millions:

Don’t try to explain to any of these protesters how those who sought to create a Marxist utopian dream of revolution also gave us the Stalinist purges, Mao’s bloody Cultural Revolution and many other efforts to collectivize thought in the name of economic “justice.” (Gasparino)

Even the benign Western European democratic socialist model is collapsing. Germany is cutting back, and what's left of the safety net comes at a high price: Wage cuts, benefit cuts, compliant unions voluntarily  trading away worker bennies in exchange for no layoffs. Their tax system is grossly un-progressive, with consumption taxes hitting the rich and the poor equally.  A gallon of gasoline costs over six dollars, and everything else, including food and heating oil, is taxed at 19%, and that's on top of the income tax. 

"Call it Crapitalism"

Gasparino visited the socialist squatter's encampment on Wall Street, and came away with this observation...

Also absent was any notice of how the much-hated banks benefited not from free-market capitalism, which would have let them fail in 2008, but from crony capitalism that bailed them out.

The similar cronyism practiced by Trumka and the Obama administration -- massive spending on useless but politically connected businesses like Solyndra, paired with class-warfare rhetoric -- likewise has very little to do with free markets.  (Gasparino)

As John Stossel Says, Occupy Wall Street is Half Right...

If by "capitalism" they mean crony capitalism (let's call it crapitalism), a system in which favored business interests are supported by government, I'm against that, too.

But if they mean the free market, then they are fools. When allowed to work, the market has lifted more people out of the mud and misery of poverty than any government, ever.

I have at least found some common ground with some Wall Street protest supporters. Joe Sibilia, who runs the website CSRWire (Corporate Social Responsibility), told me, "You can't have an environment where people are betting on financial instruments with the expectation that the government is going to bail them out."

So we agree that Wall Street bailouts are intolerable. Now we just have to teach our progressive friends that truly free markets work for the benefit of all.