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Von Aldo

Occupy Wall Street Protesters: Let’s Just Ignore Them, Perhaps They’ll Get Jobs

Photo: Ann Billingsley PhotographyWe try to avoid politics in this journal, but this month (Nov.) we couldn’t help it. On the back page of the soon-to-be-published Nov. 2011 issue, Kristen French, our features editor, are some quotes from OWS protestors. Kristen ventured downtown in late October to Zuccotti Park and interviewed several protestors herself to see what was really going on. Kristen said she found all kinds of political points of view—not just one, codified political lefty philosophy. I went downtown too, and, well, I don’t know about that. From where I sit, the protestors for the most part seem to be neo-Bolsheviks.

That is to say, they all seem to favor more government intrusion into private lives, more entitlements paid by fruits of others' labor and, well, a lack of personal liberty. Risk taking is not illegal, and shouldn’t be, obviously. But if bankers knowingly used fraudulent sales practices in the selling of the mortgaged-backed securities, then by all means, that might be criminal. Arrest anyone who did something criminal.

As for the political stance of the protestors, take note of this sentence from a self-published newspaper put out by some of the New York-based protestors: “We know that to survive this protest we will have to build non-hierarchical communal systems that care for everyone,” wrote Chris Hedges on Oct. 8 in a publication called, “The Occupied Wall Street Journal.” There are plenty more of similar comments in the publication. To me, it’s all just a bunch of extreme liberal, even socialist claptrap—this describing of the creation of a socialist utopia. That’s been tried. And it has failed. In fact, more people died in the 20th century under Marxist/socialist ideology than had ever existed on Earth before that time. The ideology fails in practice because to create such utopia, where everything is free and everyone is equal, you have to strip people of their freedom. See the photo above. Do we really want another Tragedy of the Commons, which proved in colonial New England that “ownership by all is ownership by none.” And what is so cool about seizing other people’s property? I just don’t get it.

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