Instapundit chooses the first few sentences of this piece about the Occupy Wall Street … thing, to recycle. But my favourite bit is where George Will summarises the OWS position:
Washington is grotesquely corrupt and insufficiently powerful.
I also agree with the following comment, which was attached to this:
The reason why these occupiers are getting so much attention is that the mainstream media think they’re not idiots and are advertising them, and the right wing alternative media know that they are idiots and are advertising them.
Which says part of what George Will said, and which I agree with because I wrote it.
It is, when you think about it, easier to write about something that is rather small. When you encounter an OWS event, you can listen to anyone there who wants to say anything in about ten minutes. Compare that with working out what the hell everyone thinks at a Tea Party get-together. To do an honest job on that you have to be there for hours.
But then again, these protesters are not, perhaps, all of them, complete idiots. They are very right that things have gone very wrong.
We’re due an OWS copycat demo here in London this weekend. Someone called Peter Hodgson, of UK Uncut, is calling for, among other things, “an end to austerity”, by which he means him and his friends keeping their useless jobs for ever. Good luck with that, mate.
There is actually some overlap between what some of these Occupy London characters may or may not be saying this weekend, and what my team says about it all.
Laura Taylor, a supporter of the so-called OccupyLSX, said: “Why are we paying for a crisis the banks caused? More than a million people have lost their jobs and tens of thousands of homes have been repossessed, while small businesses are struggling to survive.
“Yet bankers continue to make billions in profit and pay themselves enormous bonuses, even after we bailed them out with £850 billion.”
It’s like the Tea Party in Britain is too small, and has to climb aboard Occupy London. Well, maybe not, because Laura Taylor neglects to mention the role of the world’s governments in setting the various trains in this giant train-wreck in motion. Who caused the banks to cause this crisis? That’s what my team wants to add. The banks were only doing what the politicians had long been incentivising them to do, and the banks are doing that still. The banks are only to blame for this mess in the sense that they are now paying the politicians to keep it going. But that is quite a big blame, I do agree.
So anyway, the British government, like the US government, is now also grotesquely corrupt, and it should jolly well pull its socks up, its finger out and itself together. And then be hung from lamp posts.
Seriously, I remember back at Essex University in the early 1970s how the Lenin-with-hair tendency thought that the answer to every problem in the world then was to occupy something, fill it with rubbish and then bugger off and plan their next stupid occupation. They were tossers then, and they, their children and their grandchildren are tossers now. Farce repeating itself as farce.
Maybe I’ll dress up (as in: down) in shabby clothes and sandals with no socks (which I would never dream of doing normally) and join in, with a camera. Although, I promise nothing, because this weekend there is also the Rugby World Cup semi-finals to be attending to.
I call ’em OLOs – Obama’s Little Onions – They’re white, they’re round, they smell and they are best confronted when soaked in vodka.
Brian, the problem with these folk who go on about rich bankers is that they are right in the limited sense that banks were part of the issue, but they just cannot stand back and see how the state has deranged banking from its sober function to what it has become. That is the frustration.
I recently got into a chat with a lefty friend and I pointed out that bankers’ risk-taking was fuelled by cheap, central bank credit, and that these guys were responding to the signals relayed via the market. Change the signal, and you change the effects.
My friend gave me a funny look. But I think he got the point.
The trouble is that economics and banking is quite complicated. I mean, how many of these OWS folk know what fractional reserve banking is?
Liberté, égalité, fraternité, ou la mort!
A stopped clock is right twice a day.
We cannot really know the level of influence the banks had over the financial policy of the World Govts.
We know from Fred the shred and the influence at the FSA and his helpful friendships with New Labour that there was significant courting on both fronts and lets not pretend that the tories would have been any different.
It is easy to blame the left for the banking crisis and it is correct to point out that it is not a problem with genuine capitalism but with crony corporatism. The left danced with the devil to fund their spending spree and the banks took advantage to enslave the world in their debt.
Genuine proper lefties (I don’t mean modern “liberal” types) do not swallow the “Govt. debt is good” meme. They don’t like endebting the people to the banks.
The tea party is a cross party grass roots movement and if we want one like it then we will have to start accepting some shared values. Which I think you do.
There have been some great take downs of the corrupt and unfair banking systems on this site and Austrian Economics is a great enemy to corporatism. Something I think the anti-capitalist left are completely unaware of. If they only realised that what they are against is not capitalism but corruption and corporatism then we would find much more in common.
Banking and finance in their various forms originated and prospered as private, non-governmental instrumentalities.
Their objectives, set by the likes of the Fuggers, et al. were quite crass to “make money” (accumulate surpluses), not to achieve social objectives, but rather, personal objectives., regardless of “social” effects.
In the environments of commercial capitalism, mercantile capitalism, financial capitalism and industrial capitalism into today’s “managerial” capitalism, banking and finance developed into institutions in which the role of determining the objectives of activities (and the means used to attain them) shifted to the functionaires of the institutions. Still, the basic drives of those activities remained “to make money,” ( but raising issues of “for whom?”).
Apparently disregarded in the “public frustrations” are the effects of extending the powers of governments into the operations of institutions (generally) and into these in particular, to influence (if not dominate) the determinations of objectives and means to ends, purportedly for politically determined social utility [?].
What is being experienced in the “West” are “political” intrusions (through the mechanisms of governments) into institutions that developed from civil instrumentalities of private, diverse objectives, to enlarge political spheres on the grounds of potential social utility.
Which is exactly when they’d stopped being the ‘left’.
The quote
is half right and half wrong. Washington is corrupt because it is too powerful. Why the hell else would corruption flock to a political centre? It’s the place where you can shortcut getting things done in exchange for money and/or support.
Nonsense! They are completely different
In those days occupations tended to be indoors. You know, where it tends to be warm.
Today’s geniuses not only picked the street they have started just before the cold sets in.
Gareth, I think that was Wills’ point: these protesters, while vaguely correct in their discomfiture, are not sufficiently educated/intelligent to appreciate the inherent contradiction in what they are (supposedly) agitating for.
And the idea that they are not so much anti-capitalist as anti-corporatist is precisely the point I made the other day in another thread.
Or as I like to put it, Laird:
We give Big Government enormous power to *uck up people’s lives. (I’ll let people put the letter or letters of their choice in place of the asterisk.) It is eminently logical that people will go to great lengths to ensure that Big Government is *ucking up somebody else’s life.
It also stands to reason that the solution is not to give Big Government more power to *uck up people’s lives.
The big banks would not exist today if the governments did not save them, using taxpayers’ money.
If the protesters demand that governments desist from handing out our money to the failed banks and corporations – I’m with them.
The protesters, of course, are too ignorant to formulate a coherent list of demands, and they emit just fashionable lefty gibberish about the “power of the people”, etc.
This is a fascinating rebuff (Link)of the OWS manifest.
The only thing people of that ilk try to occupy are other people’s perceptions. They get a kick out of it. They are the instigators. They feel in control. And dam to everybody else. They want change, but their change, not yours. Remember, it takes two to tango.
I think Lloyds would be fine today had it not been bullied by one James Gordon Brown to buy a Scottish money (printing) pit. HSBC was fine. Barclays was fine and, if evacuated from the burning building it had recently been invited into (RBS), NatWest would have survived.
All four of the big “high street” banks. Investment banks would go down, malinvestment liquidated. Short term liquidity shock. Heads on poles pour encourager les autres.
No, we had Ed “blinky” Balls blink first, enabling the banks to laugh all the way back, er, to their offices.
p.s. IIRC, during Brown’s tenure, the UK Government moved its banking from the BoE to, erm…RBS of all places. Wonder why there was such interest, outside the obvious and immediate Brownian ego of a Scottish currency issuing bank, in not going down in flames.
I think someone on another thread mentioned the scorpion and the frog. I don’t think we can shake our fingers too much at the banks, they are out to make money, it’s the nature of the beast.
If governments tell them they can make LOTS of money by (literally) making money, and lending it to them (and ordinary folk) and then not only get it back (with interest) but also a huge bailout, you can hardly blame them for snapping it up.
We may say that governments and banks are necessary evils, but one is far more necessary than the other, and one of them needs to go.
You’ve stumped me, wh00ps. Which one?
Which is more necessary? Or which needs to go?
imo, recent(ish) events have shown that the two cannot occupy the same point in the space-time continuum without bad things happening. Banks are required to facilitate and simplify the exchange of my goods-in skills for the baker’s skills, the brewer’s skills, and so forth (although alternatives can and do exist).
Governments are required to provide -ahem- impartial courts and to… protect us from other governments.
Some of us are planning on popping along on Sunday to see if there is common ground (that’s if it doesn’t turn into a riot on Saturday) Details to be posted at libertarianhome