Romney: Occupy Wall Street 'wrong way to go'

[pbrower2a]

I maintain that these protests are composed of hipsters, college students, and ex-hippies, and I've not seen evidence to the contrary sans a few singular examples.

You need to watch something other than FoX Newspeak Channel and listen to people other than Rush Limbaugh.

The college students? I understand. They have the most to lose in an economy that looks like that of a fascist dictatorship, a plantation society, or a resuscitation of a feudal order. Today's college students who are buying into the American Dream with a huge burden of debt fear that they may get the debt without the Dream.

Economic inequality in America is now as severe as it was in the late 1920s. The economic elites are on the brink of creating an economic order in which most people compete with each other to see who make the greatest sacrifices on behalf of elites that believe that they owe the rest of humanity nothing except the bounties of their own selfish indulgence. 

America solves that problem or it has a revolution or a civil war in its future -- and the opposing sides in a civil war might not be the gentlemanly types who faced off between 1861 and 1865. Our economic elites certainly aren't gentlemen.

[pbrower2a]

We already live in a world where those who work pay taxes, and the more you earn, the higher your individual tax contribution. Advocating we take more and more from successful people to give to others is advocacy of theft through coercion. Or, perhaps a less harsh way of putting it is by calling it class warfare. Take your pick.

Successful at what? Being born into the right family? Getting a bigger profit by treating one's subordinate as expendable objects? Schmoozing with political leaders? Such people deserve to pay higher tax rates. I find it hard to see what good they do for us except to do no harm. Someone who changes the bed pans in the hospital or does construction work? Such is tangible. A sane economic order recognizes that hard work deserves to be taxed slightly and that cash-cow income can be taxed heavily without people giving up the cash cows.

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I don't say that people who make an extraordinary living because they serve customers well or have made themselves into top-notch surgeons, attorneys, engineers, or creative people should be taxed into ruin. It's the people with the cash-cow incomes who need the government services to ensure that their property rights be protected, that they have a customer base that would disappear if working people went destitute, that their investments overseas be protected by the Armed Forces, and that the roads that deliver their luxuries pe passable for those luxuries and be safe from highway robbers. The richer one is, the greater one's stake is in preserving the status quo from obvious threats.     

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Like funding groups whose purpose is to debase and impoverish everyone but themselves? The Food Stamps that keep some people from starving are funded through taxes. 

 

[pbrower2a]

Do you think the person who changes a bedpan in a hospital should make just as much as the doctor who treats the patient, or the executive who ensures the hospital continues to survive, or the individuals who actually own the hospital and have taken on all of the headaches from the risk involved in owning the entity?

The doctor? Of course a doctor merits far more pay than an orderly. It would be easy to make an orderly out of a physician but not to make a doctor out of the usual orderly. Isn't that obvious? Most hospitals used to be non-profit, and turning a non-profit entity into a for-profit entity (not always a good idea) often requires some sweetening of the deal.

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We have something like 10% unemployment as it is and declining standards of living despite efforts to privatize everything. Leaving the economy to cartels and trusts is one way to ensure high prices and high unemployment. At that the "winner" entitlement that we see in America can be just as destructive.

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But the US has the highest level of economic inequality in the advanced industrial world. People are going hungry as the welfare system is gutted. Our economy has gone from "Everyone has a chance" to "Suffer for my greed!" In many respects things are worse than they were when Carter was President.  The rich have gotten richer and others are certifiably poorer. So much for "progress"!

Our corporate masters want an order in which the common man is obliged to compete to establish who will suffer the most for bosses and owners in return for the least of rewards. Those masters are of about the same level of morality as the planters of the Old South, commie bureaucrats, feudal lords, and the sorts of tycoons who bankrolled Mussolini, Hitler, and Tojo.
   

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To the Hard Right, anyone who dissents with plutocracy as it is now developing is a participant in "class warfare". The Hard Right is as dishonest in its lexicon as commies, fascists, and the fictional masters of Orwell's Oceania in 1984. The super-rich have imposed their sort of class warfare upon us, and they have been winning. 

[pbrower2a]

(previously cited)

Ah! Rich people are "winners" and poor people are "losers!" Gotcha!

Yes, let's have a "meritocracy-it's a marathon race, where a few Olympic runners get an hour head start over the rest of the competition, none of whom are Olympic runners and all of whom have broken legs! And the people on the sidelines cheering the Olympic runners are scolding the people with broken legs for not keeping up!

You don't realize that "Free enterprise driven by competition with no political favoritism for anybody" is a hopelessly impossible thing to enforce, because that inevitably favors the already rich.

Do you not realize that the economic pie is not fixed in size? It is not stagnant nor is it set in stone as to who gets what percentage of the pie every year (since people retire, die, emigrate, etc. all of the time).

Our elites are shrinking the shares that they allow us to have as the pie increases -- because they are transforming manufacturing companies into importers.  The sort of competition that they allow us is a race to the bottom -- perhaps even back to debt-bondage. How nice!

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People whose living standards are going down solely so that tycoons and executives can wax even fatter are losers. Losers with good attitudes by your standards are still loses. But most of us did not choose to become losers. Someone else often made the profitable choice that multitudes would be losers on behalf of an economic paradigm that holds that maximal inequality is a good idea in itself.

Our elites are cheating us out of all dignity, and for what? 

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No favoritism? Privatization deals usually involve some choice of political hacks in on them. Merit means nothing without opportunity, and the opportunity even to own and operate a business means nothing other than personal ruin if there are no potential customers.  Entities like Wal-Mart have been crushing small-scale competition. 

 

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Wrong. Tax-and-spend creates a secondary market. Food assistance ends up back in the system through the cash registers of food sellers. Medicaid payments go to medical staff and medical suppliers (including the landlords of medical offices and pharmacies). Government spending on public works itself works its way through contractors to construction workers and to companies that supply glass, steel, concrete, and other necessities of those projects.  Tax-and-spend puts people back to work -- people often in great need who can then buy new stuff, pay off bills, and meet neglected needs. 

Tax-and-spend enlarges the tax base; austerity shrinks it.