What protesters across the country see as the failure of capitalism is something else - the triumph of cronyism, the failure of government intervention, the triumph of politics over economics as a way to choose life's winners.The real tragedy is that it's not just these half-cocked demonstrators who want more government intervention to "solve" our problems, it's the majority of Americans (excluding the Tea Party folks).
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Most complaints about capitalism these days are really about crony capitalism, or cronyism. Free market capitalism is not cronyism. According to Palmer, cronyism has “mired so many nations in corruption and backwardness.” It lets the politically connected get rich not by producing goods, but by gathering privileges from others under the authority of the state, what Frederic Bastiat called “legal plunder.”
People like the Wall Street occupiers hate crony capitalism, but at the same time they demand more government intervention.
They want what cronyism yields. Guaranteed.
"Capitalism, morality, and blindness on Wall Street." By John Paul Cassil, Washington Times, 10/4/11.
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Take a look at this jaw-dropping list of demands from the Wall St. occupiers:
From the Occupy Wall Street website, via Picket and Loesch:
(Hat Tip: Gateway Pundit)
Demand one: Restoration of the living wage. This demand can only be met by ending “Freetrade” by re-imposing trade tariffs on all imported goods entering the American market to level the playing field for domestic family farming and domestic manufacturing as most nations that are dumping cheap products onto the American market have radical wage and environmental regulation advantages. Another policy that must be instituted is raise the minimum wage to twenty dollars an hr.
Demand two: Institute a universal single payer healthcare system. To do this all private insurers must be banned from the healthcare market as their only effect on the health of patients is to take money away from doctors, nurses and hospitals preventing them from doing their jobs and hand that money to wall st. investors.
Demand three: Guaranteed living wage income regardless of employment.
Demand four: Free college education.
Demand five: Begin a fast track process to bring the fossil fuel economy to an end while at the same bringing the alternative energy economy up to energy demand.
Demand six: One trillion dollars in infrastructure (Water, Sewer, Rail, Roads and Bridges and Electrical Grid) spending now.
Demand seven: One trillion dollars in ecological restoration planting forests, reestablishing wetlands and the natural flow of river systems and decommissioning of all of America’s nuclear power plants.
Demand eight: Racial and gender equal rights amendment.
Demand nine: Open borders migration. anyone can travel anywhere to work and live.
Demand ten: Bring American elections up to international standards of a paper ballot precinct counted and recounted in front of an independent and party observers system.
Demand eleven: Immediate across the board debt forgiveness for all. Debt forgiveness of sovereign debt, commercial loans, home mortgages, home equity loans, credit card debt, student loans and personal loans now! All debt must be stricken from the “Books.” World Bank Loans to all Nations, Bank to Bank Debt and all Bonds and Margin Call Debt in the stock market including all Derivatives or Credit Default Swaps, all 65 trillion dollars of them must also be stricken from the “Books.” And I don’t mean debt that is in default, I mean all debt on the entire planet period.
Demand twelve: Outlaw all credit reporting agencies.
Demand thirteen: Allow all workers to sign a ballot at any time during a union organizing campaign or at any time that represents their yeah or nay to having a union represent them in collective bargaining or to form a union.
These demands will create so many jobs it will be completely impossible to fill them without an open borders policy.
As one comment at Gateway Pundit noted about the passing of Steven Jobs:
And isn’t it ironic that those, smelly, unwashed, maggot infested, neo-hippies are probably “Tweeting” on iPhones and listening to Rules for Radicals with the iBooks app on an iPod. Innovations made possible by the personal initiative fostered by, OMG, the capitalism they loathe so much?
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