The Myth of the 1% and Other Occupy Wall Street Crumbs

I just stumbled across this great article from the Cato Institute, which was posted on my Facebook feed, of all places.  It’s a commentary on Occupy Wall Street and how things aren’t always as they initially appear.

I have a lot of university friends who have been involved in the protests in San Francisco and Denver.  I want to be clear that I think it’s great that young people are politically active at all.  I think that’s a great step in the right direction, in some respects.  However, I think that people also need to get it clear in their minds exactly what they’re protesting against.  Although I know that my friends who are involved have it in their minds politically what they want – which, believe me, is a far cry from what I’m after – I maintain that most of the people involved, while well intentioned , are somewhat (okay, a lot) misguided.

The Cato article, written by Michael Tanner, makes some incredibly compelling points about the wealthy in America today.  Eighty percent of all millionaires in America are the first in their families to be wealthy.  The wealthy also work longer hours than lower wage earners.  You can check out the article for a break-down of the makeup of some of this slice of society, but the majority seems to be made up of professionals and entrepreneurs.  That’s not exactly what we’re being led to believe, is it?

Also interesting to note is that since 2007, there has been a sharp decline – by 39%, in fact – in the number of millionaires making over $10 million per year.  The super-rich have been hit even harder with a 55% decline.  Also interesting to note is the short but sweet expose on the likes of Warren Buffett, who made the claim that his secretary gets taxed more than he does.  That probably has to do with the fact that most of earnings come from capital gains, and therefore the money is taken out in corporate taxes.  Most damning of all is the fact that the rich earn 16% of the total American income, and they pay 36% of all the income taxes.  Suddenly, it doesn’t quite seem as though the rich aren’t paying their share.

Ultimately, what these Occupy Wall Street protestors fail to see and/or comprehend is that the government doesn’t create jobs – the private sector does.  And the rich are in a far better position to hire these down-and-out folks than other poor people or our bankrupt government.  So many of these protestors see the government as the center of everything.  They have no idea how economics in the real world work.  They think that if we raise the taxes of the middle class and the rich and put that money into the hands of government, regulate the heck out of what’s left of the private sector, and demand more workers’ rights, it’s somehow going to fix the problem.  People have got to wake up and realize that government IS the problem.

For every dollar that goes into government hands, it’s a dollar taken away from the private sector.  It’s a dollar taken out of the hands of private citizens who may spend that money however they like.  The only way a government can create jobs is by expanding its own already enormous girth, and that ultimately kills more jobs than it creates.

Look at the other things that the government spends its money on: air conditioning in Iraq, missiles to chuck at Libya, maintaining Camp Humphrey outside of Seoul, paying appallingly high salaries, pensions, and benefits to Congressmen, and paying for programs that purport to life people out of poverty but are, in reality, doing anything but.  We have lost the war on drugs, the war on poverty, and now we are losing the war to maintain what little freedom we have left.

So what’s the solution, you ask?  It starts with education.  Get down to those protests and try to educate people on what we should really be protesting – the Federal Reserve, the endless wars, the expanding government, the war on drugs, low interest rates, and endless government bailouts.  Let’s talk about the government regulating us to the point where we can’t drink raw milk, if that’s what we want.  We can turn the tide, but we’ve got to get the word out.  It’s up to us to help people understand that true freedom isn’t something given to you by a government authority – it’s something with which we are all born and, unless we are careful, are very liable to find ourselves without, and we won’t even know how we lost it or why.