1. Wall Street did this to us.
The pseudo-capitalists will tell you that regulatory pressures passed during Democratic majorities in the middle of the Reagan presidency created perverse incentives that somehow turned Wall Street into a monster. All this says is that the regulator framework was a poor one. What we do know is that the shadow banks created a spiraling game of musical chairs, with more people joining every day and fewer chairs being added, and when the music stopped, it crashed. The invisible hand in this case destroyed America's wealth.
2. The 1% are paying lower taxes.
Because they make their money by using money, they can game the capital gains system and have a tax rate of 15-20%, whereas you and I can pay as much as 35% of our income as taxes.
3. The 1% are getting richer.
Unburdened from the tax obligations of ordinary Americans, the 1% are getting richer. By any measure, they are not doing more work or providing more service. There is no moral framework that justifies the climb to even greater wealth, and even greater impoverishment for the rest, without contributing more to the well-being of the world. The whole point of even libertarian schemes is that wealth is a measure of one's productivity.
4. The finance industry is rigged.
In one of Tom Clancy's books, he has a scene where he ridicules lefties for believing that there are "secret codes" by which the rich and powerful rule the world.
The codes aren't secret. You just can't have them. You don't have the resources, and can't make the handshakes necessary, to play billionaire's poker, nor do you even understand why traders are buying a $300 million cable to shave 9 milliseconds off international transactions. Between you and me, and the super-wealthy, is an insulating layer of half guard-labor, half high-speed computational "quants" that extract money from transactions without adding value to the system.
There are two legitimate forms of finance: values investing, and efficiency investing. The first ought to be the backbone of our markets: betting on the long-term value of real assets such as businesses and land. The latter ought to be a small side-game in which investors try to up the amount of knowledge they have about various stocks and other investment vehicles representing real assets. The latter used to be about 6% of US GDP in the 1950s; today it is 31%.
5. The problem isn't capitalism. It's plutocracy. And plutocracy is the problem.
Corporations themselves are not inherently evil. What is evil is the regulatory capture of the government by corporations that has led to unfettered tramping on the privacy, dignity, and even lives of ordinary Americans. What is evil is the donatory capture of senators and congresspeople by corporations that leads to the supposed representatives of the American People to look the other way at that regulatory capture.
There is nothing hypocritical about Americans buying and using the products of American corporations. The people at Occupy Wall Street are not protesting capitalism. They're protesting the way the legal infrastructure on which capitalism rests has resulted in a crash caused by runaway economic alchemy unrooted from reality, and the way the Wall Street Vampire Squid continues its clampdown on the face of main street, jamming its blood funnel into anything that even remotely smells of money.
Three years after massive fraud destroyed lives and decimated the American middle class, The Wall Street message to Washington remains the same: "nobody goes to jail," or we'll do it again.
Like they won't do it again anyway.
The pseudo-capitalists will tell you that regulatory pressures passed during Democratic majorities in the middle of the Reagan presidency created perverse incentives that somehow turned Wall Street into a monster. All this says is that the regulator framework was a poor one. What we do know is that the shadow banks created a spiraling game of musical chairs, with more people joining every day and fewer chairs being added, and when the music stopped, it crashed. The invisible hand in this case destroyed America's wealth.
2. The 1% are paying lower taxes.
Because they make their money by using money, they can game the capital gains system and have a tax rate of 15-20%, whereas you and I can pay as much as 35% of our income as taxes.
3. The 1% are getting richer.
Unburdened from the tax obligations of ordinary Americans, the 1% are getting richer. By any measure, they are not doing more work or providing more service. There is no moral framework that justifies the climb to even greater wealth, and even greater impoverishment for the rest, without contributing more to the well-being of the world. The whole point of even libertarian schemes is that wealth is a measure of one's productivity.
4. The finance industry is rigged.
In one of Tom Clancy's books, he has a scene where he ridicules lefties for believing that there are "secret codes" by which the rich and powerful rule the world.
The codes aren't secret. You just can't have them. You don't have the resources, and can't make the handshakes necessary, to play billionaire's poker, nor do you even understand why traders are buying a $300 million cable to shave 9 milliseconds off international transactions. Between you and me, and the super-wealthy, is an insulating layer of half guard-labor, half high-speed computational "quants" that extract money from transactions without adding value to the system.
There are two legitimate forms of finance: values investing, and efficiency investing. The first ought to be the backbone of our markets: betting on the long-term value of real assets such as businesses and land. The latter ought to be a small side-game in which investors try to up the amount of knowledge they have about various stocks and other investment vehicles representing real assets. The latter used to be about 6% of US GDP in the 1950s; today it is 31%.
5. The problem isn't capitalism. It's plutocracy. And plutocracy is the problem.
Corporations themselves are not inherently evil. What is evil is the regulatory capture of the government by corporations that has led to unfettered tramping on the privacy, dignity, and even lives of ordinary Americans. What is evil is the donatory capture of senators and congresspeople by corporations that leads to the supposed representatives of the American People to look the other way at that regulatory capture.
There is nothing hypocritical about Americans buying and using the products of American corporations. The people at Occupy Wall Street are not protesting capitalism. They're protesting the way the legal infrastructure on which capitalism rests has resulted in a crash caused by runaway economic alchemy unrooted from reality, and the way the Wall Street Vampire Squid continues its clampdown on the face of main street, jamming its blood funnel into anything that even remotely smells of money.
Three years after massive fraud destroyed lives and decimated the American middle class, The Wall Street message to Washington remains the same: "nobody goes to jail," or we'll do it again.
Like they won't do it again anyway.
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