Reflections From a Murky Pond

On November 17, 2011, the day after Mayor Bloomberg finally chased the OWS rabble out of Zuccotti Park, they vowed to shutdown Wall St and the financial institutions located there. They called it the Day Of Disruption

As should have been expected the slackers’ efforts were a pathetic failure. Also as should be expected, they had no staying power. While some shouted that the “event” would last all week or longer, Wall St. was quiet, peaceful, and efficient on November 18.

NYSE Is Utterly Quiet

The police officers in NYPD’s security checkpoint at the NYSE were far more concerned about the fact that one part of the bottom bracing on their rain cover was broken than in anything going on around the NYSE – because nothing was going on.

Wall St. And Nassau St, Quiet As Well

Passersby and a few tourists could and did go about their business with no interference from the OWS rabble or law enforcement personnel charged with containing them.

So much for the OWS rabble’s Day Of Disruption and continuance of their illegal occupation of Lower Manhattan. Like all angry monkeys, they made a lot noise and flung a lot of feces but the creations of Man withstood them and enforced order upon them. Like all attempts at Socialism, it and it’s proponents were rejected by Americans.

I’d say that it was back to business as usual on Wall St. but business was largely never other than usual there during the occupation. It was only the small businesses and residents that were disrupted by the filth of OWS.

Related Reading:

It’s a tired and overused metaphor but one that has become so utterly entrenched in America’s vocabulary that few of us ever even think about it – the wealth pie.

People “want a bigger piece of the pie” or they complain that, “No matter how you slice it, the rich get most of the pie.”

This is a horribly pernicious falsehood. The pie is a lie. It’s a false metaphor that has helped create much of America’s current social and economic woe.

Zero Truth In Zero Sum

The first great falsehood of the “money pie” is that it is predicated upon wealth being a zero-sum game; i.e., there is a finite and/or fixed amount of houses, cars, healthcare, etc. to divide amongst the population, and the more the 1% get the less is left for the rest of us. Once, that held some truth, but now that our personal and national economies are not agrarian-based this is no longer true. Wealth is no longer a constant; it grows, shrinks, and changes with ever increasing rapidity.

Now add to that the fact that no nation, especially not America, is economically isolated. Globalism has expanded the sources of wealth, labor, and materials across nations’ borders. This means that when looking at the distribution of wealth within any singular nation one has to ascertain how much of that wealth came from within its borders and how much of came from exogenous sources. In other words, wealth flows.

Not Even A Crumb

The second and far more destructive great falsehood of the “money pie” is it engenders the belief that wealth owned by society. That is patently false.  Society as a whole doesn’t own even a single crumb of this fictional “money pie.” Society is a process -  a woefully amorphous process at best – and, as such, neither creates nor owns wealth and has no authority to claim it or divide it in any manner whatsoever.

Wealth, that growing, shrinking, flowing, ever changing chimera,  is created by individuals – either singularly or in voluntary association with each other – and morally belongs to those individuals and solely to those individuals. It doesn’t belong to “society” or any other unrelated individuals or groups. To believe otherwise is one of the greatest of evils, that of slavery.

Yes, slavery. If an individual does not have the full right to product of his or her labor to do with and apportion as he or she wills, that individual is a slave and is merely chattel of those who have usurped the authority to dispose of that individual’s product.

Related Reading:

The Lamestream MSM seems to be in a bit of a quandary as to what spin to put on the Occupy Wall St. “movement.” They’re spending near equal time trying to paint them as more acceptable than the TEA Party and trying to play up the similarities between the two groups.

To be fair, the is a slight basis for the comparison. Both groups identified that there was and is a problem with America’s economic systems and “took to the streets” in order to make their voices heard. That’s as far as the similarity goes though. Very quickly the intrinsic natures of the participants showed themselves and the two movements diverged into Americanism vs. Liberalism.

That’s the way of it. The only comparison between the patriots of the TEA Party and the slackers of the OWS mob is that both groups realize that the political-economic “system” in America is broken and needs repairs that nearly amount to a rebuild. They are, however, antithetical to each other when it comes to how the system is broken, why it’s broken, and what a fixed system even looks like.

~*~

NOTE: This only pertains to those OWS insurgents that have an economic agenda and doesn’t apply to- or necessarily include the plethora of other Leftists with unrelated manifestos that have gathered with them in a generalized “emo” tantrum.

Related Reading: