Key 1: Image
The first thing to understand is that the majority of Occupation Protestors want to address an injustice, or more accurately, they want to take on the image of a fighter for justice. But they have three fundamental problems in doing so.
First, they live in America so they have no significant injustice to address, no more than a college student does in protesting the disparity among grades. Second, they don’t have the talent or understanding of the world required to make serious change, like doctors, scientists, and entrepreneurs. Third, they don’t have those talents, or aren’t using those talents if they do happen to have them, because they lack the fortitude to make an investment in real change, like dedicating their lives to a science or otherwise contributing to society.
Key 2: Zero-Sum Fallacy
They chant it and rant it. The top 1% control %90 of the wealth. (It’s actually 42%) Regardless, they see this as an injustice. Why? Because the Occupation Protestors collectively suffer from the Zero-Sum fallacy. In other words, if you have a dollar it’s because someone else does not have that dollar. So they, and Liberals/Progressives, want more aggressive income redistribution, so things will be fair.
Because their logic is based on a fallacy though, it won’t work. There is no tap from which wealth pours. The top 1%, or top 5% or 10% of wage earners or wealth controllers didn’t get their money due to a system that unfairly distributes wealth. They created or earned that wealth doing things and creating things of value in a system that allows people to create wealth. It’s called freedom or Capitalism. If you decide to start redistributing their rewards for doing and creating these valuable things, they’ll find something else to do, and that wealth you were counting on redistributing will disappear. The Occupation Protestors don’t, or refuse to, understand this.
Key 3: Goals
To a person, none of these protestors can articulate what the movement wants. This conclusion I came to from listening to NPR’s coverage. The best they can do is cite “education” as their goal… Not education in the form of educating themselves on how the world currently works, but rather in the form of informing others of profound things they have recently learned but the rest of us have known for the past 20 to 80 years. Interestingly, if you listen to NPR’s coverage, about two thirds of these protestors happen to be students or recent graduates of ivy-lead schools, almost everyone they interview.
Key 4: Actual Goals
Do you wonder how so many people can just take a few months out of their lives and go camping—especially in a country that is supposedly so economically unfair? Could you afford to do that? There are supporters. Many of the supporters are no different than the average protestor. They want to take on the image of a fighter for justice, but without having to actually fight. So they contribute funds to the big make-believe fight.
Other supporters include Leftist groups. These groups want a pure form of democracy, the kind that moves swiftly to European style socialism. These groups’ goals have been on life support since the near, and still possible, collapse of the Euro zone and subsequent move toward austerity, and since the Tea Party movement abruptly and rudely kicked the training wheels off the Obama administration. They need something that looks like a populist movement in America to prevent the erosion of what little progress they have made in recent years, and to possibly get them another juicy chance to pass more Progressive Change.
Summary
So essentially that’s it, they are a force for Socialism. They are trying to close those ports in order to harm corporate profits. Not any corporation specifically, but corporations in general, because they disagree with the inherently unfair system that allows the creation of profit-seeking entities. The fact that regular people will lose jobs and see increased living costs is worth their long-term goals fairness and equality. Of course, their goals will never be achieved because, as I’ve explained, they’re based on a Zero-Sum fallacy.
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Raging Kitty