It took two whole months, but Occupy DC protestors finally came up with a “Declaration of Occupation” to justify their invasion of D.C.’s Freedom Plaza and the recently-refurbished McPherson Square, which destroyed the just-planted stimulus sod.
The resulting smelly, unsightly, rat-attracting illegal urban campgrounds are a perfect metaphor for the collectivist Declaration of Dependence they finally came up with.
As noted elsewhere, the Occupiers seem to be mostly upset about having to repay their student loans. Their ire is understandable, as being deeply in debt is a real bummer when a job is harder to find than a shower.
But instead of blaming the Obama White House for persistent unemployment, economic policies that failed to stimulate the economy despite an unprecedented gush of federal spending, and the one unthinkable takeover of the automobile, mortgage, student loan and health care industries, ODCers are in a major funk over “corporate dominance” — which they claim “subverts democracy” and deprives them of “our rights to healthcare, education, food, water, and housing [which] are sacrificed to profit-driven market forces.”
Their solution: the hoary old utopian dream of “shar[ing] available resources.” Of course, in real life, this means giving even more power to the same federal government that saved the big banks they so despise in the largest corporate bailout in American history.
Bloomberg now reports that the Federal Reserve kept Congress in the dark about secret emergency loans totaling $13 billion, and that “the Fed had committed $7.77 trillion as of March 2009 to rescuing the financial system, more than half the value of everything produced in the U.S. that year.”
This is the very definition of “rigging the system” to benefit the favored few. But the Occupier’s outrage is limited to a single garbled paragraph:
The large financial institutions that made bad decisions should have been allowed to fail. The bailout of these irresponsible banks at taxpayer expense was a political decision made in Washington. They then used the public funds to shore up their own private balance sheets instead of making credit available to struggling homeowners and small businesses.
But the Declaration goes off track when it lumps these corporate parasites together with all private companies that sell needed goods and services to willing buyers as “looters.” And the cradle-to-grave government-provided “rights” the Occupiers demand in their effort to “reclaim the commons” can only be provided if that same federal government subverts democracy even more by forcible redistribution of wealth.
This socialist model has been tried and failed so many times that it is a major indictment of our system of higher education that college graduates still believe this junk. Maybe they do deserve a tuition refund.
“Disarray, destruction and decay are the logical legacy of the application of the collectivist ideal,” wrote Hillsdale College Professor Richard Ebeling back in 1993.
“This ideal include[s] three ideas: the theory of a planned economy, the belief in collective or group rights, and the notion of socialized or state-provided social services.”
Austrian economists “Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek showed clearly and irrefutably that when private property was nationalized and market competition eliminated, economic irrationality would result,” Ebeling added.
The current irrational mess is the inevitable result of decades of state-provided social services based on “group rights” in a highly regulated and controlled type of crony capitalism that now prevails in the U.S. Occupy DC’s collectivist “solution” — to expand government’s grip on the economy even more — will just lead to more misery and social decay.
However, one hopeful statement in the Declaration of Dependence cannot be contested: “A better world is possible,” it declares.
Indeed. And restoring McPherson Square and Freedom Plaza to their best use as public spaces that all Washingtonians and visitors to the nation’s capital can once again enjoy would be a good place to start.
