Sort of political Monday

Inequality?
Suppose you were a member of a committee studying rape on campus and you and your fellow committee members have come up with a list of recommendations designed to reduce incidence of rape. Now imagine to your shock that you discover that the campus rapists also have a committee and they have put together a list of things that would make it easier for them to commit and get away with rape and, to your even greater shock, that the thing at the very top of their wish list is exactly the same thing you have at the top of your list of things that would reduce rape.

That would give you pause wouldn't it?

Some of the world's most powerful and wealthy people meet annually in Davos, Switzerland to decide what issues are most in their self interest. And this past January they considered that the most important issue might be exactly the same thing the protestors at Occupy Wall Street say is the most important issue:

The gap between the rich and the poor within both developed and developing nations needs to shrink to build a more sustainable economy that avoids the damage caused by asset bubbles. 

Think about that, a bunch of fat cats got together last January and said "we should be worried about inequality" and nine months later a bunch of protestors went out on the streets to tell the fat cats exactly what they wanted to be told. Is that upsetting your sense of moral clarity? If that isn't enough, consider this, big Wall Street donors gave more money to Barrack Obama than to any other candidate in history.

You're being had. Occupy Wall Street is not the 99 percent rising up against the one percent, it's a bunch of middle class college kids doing exactly what the most wealthy and powerful people in our society want them to do. This should sound familiar. I've written before about how the big counter-culture rock bands favoured by student rebels of the 1960s and 1970s managed to do exactly what their corporate masters wanted them to do.

The whole notion of "rebellion" has been reduced to nothing but a powerful marketing tool. Why? Mostly because of government and the uses it can be put to by the rich and powerful. Every "rebellion"ends up serving the interests of the people in power. Demand the government do something and it will do something.

Cognitive dissonance
Joe Nocera wrote a piece a while ago highlighting what he found to be eerie parallels between now and the depression. He'd just read a book about the 1930s called Since Yesterday. He generously allowed that the depression was much worse but went on to say similar things were happening. Now, let me pause to point out that some journalist manages to find parallels with the great depression in every financial downturn and that this is perhaps unsurprsing given that all downturns are, well, downturns. It would be more surprising if there were not parallels. But I digress.

The telling ommission in Nocera's piece comes out in two sentences. First there is a paragraph that begins with this:

And when Allen describes “Hooverville” — a large encampment of war veterans demanding promised bonus payments — Occupy Wall Street springs to mind. 

Then the very next paragraph begins like this:

In Since Yesterday, bankers are vilified; homes are foreclosed on; people desperately search for work — just like today. 

Well, actually, something else was vilified in the 1930s that isn't being vilified now.  You can get a powerful hint of it in the name "Hooverville". The government of the day and its president was vilified. Nobody, least of all Joe Nocera, is vilifying the government of our day.

I've been writing recently about how the Occupy protests are heaving influenced by anarchism. They are not, however, actually anarchists because anarchists oppose governments. The Occupy people are all interested in giving the government more power!

Here's something to ponder. Everyone agrees that inequality is growing. Okay, let's consider some of the things that governments have done to reduce inequality:

• The public school system has been more and more heavily financed to provide the same quality education to the rich as the poor.
• Health care is provided so that the rich will not have exclusive access to it.
• A progressive tax system is in place to make sure the rich pay proportionately more of the cost of government.
• Governments created huge agencies such as Fannie Mae to make it easier for people to get mortgages because home owners tended to be wealthier and making home ownership available to more people would reduce inequality.
• On similar grounds, governments made huge investments in universities and made it easier for people to get huge loans to pay for university because that too was a thing the wealthy had and it was believed that making university education more generally available would decrease inequality.

I could go on and on and on but I'll stop there. The point is that for the last 80 years reducing inequality has been a major focus of government. Trillions of dollars have been spent and we have now arrived at the point where the programs designed to reduce inequality are beginning to (literally) bankrupt governments. The failures of some of these programs—first home ownership and now university education—have also begun to bankrupt a whole lot of individuals. And yet there is more inequality than there was before governments decided to fix it!

So even if we take it that wealth inequality is bad thing (something that is by no means clear), surely it ought to be obvious by now that governments are absolutely useless at reducing inequality. What governments have been very good at is using inequality as an excuse to put more and more money and power into the hands of a narrow group of interests. And when the going gets tough, governments show their true colours by bailing out Wall Street while leaving you smothered in student loans and mortgages.

And now that things have gotten really bad, the powerful people want you to go sleep on the pavement in a tent and protest inequality so that governments can have even more power to help out Wall Street even more. How many times are you going to fall for this trick?

The percentage you're paying is too high priced
While you're living behind all your means
And the man in the suit has bough a new car
from the profit he's made on your dreams (link goes to a video)

That lyric was written exactly forty years ago. The odd thing is that it was written by a man who really believed in rebellion; he didn't see any irony in his own lyric. Well, maybe the great rebellion was still young then. But if you honestly believe that the current Occupy rebellion is going to do anything but make the rich and powerful even richer and more powerful, you're stupid.