Occupy Wall Street

It was with a certain amount of interest that I read of a bunch of protesters antagonizing the banks. Great!!! Well let's check into this one.

The more I found out, the more I was like... uhhhhh.... who are these guys and what exactly are they protesting?

From http://www.openmarket.org/2011/10/05/occupy-wall-street-protesters-make-demands/ :

Let’s take a quick look at each of the demands. I have left his grammatical errors intact:

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.

He’s being far too moderate here. Take as true that importing goods across international borders kills jobs. Well, as a matter of logic, importing goods across state borders is no different. Oregonians should be forbidden from importing goods from Californians. Inter-city free trade has the same harmful effects. Consistency demands banning that, too. Even inter-household trade kills jobs under this line of thought.

If the protesters arbitrarily draw the line at the national level, then there is an inconsistency in their thought. And economists from the left and the right have been openly poking fun at that inconsistency for over 200 years.

And why only a $20 minimum wage? Think big. If Congress can raise living standards simply by mandating higher wages, why not $200 per hour? Why not $2,000 per hour?


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.

Because monopolies work so well.

Demand three: Guaranteed living wage income regardless of employment.

This isn’t worded clearly. Does this mean a $20 minimum wage for all workers, as in Demand One? Or does it mean giving unemployment benefits equivalent to a living wage, however defined? If it’s the second case, it’s pretty easy to see that fewer people would choose to work if this demand was met. As any economist will tell you, incentives matter.

Demand four: Free college education.

This should be re-worded as “Demand Four: The poor and uneducated must give money to the rich and educated.” This just sounds like the protesters, many of them students, don’t want to pay their tuition and their student loans (see also Demand Eleven).

This demand is fundamentally regressive. Wealth redistribution from rich to poor is one thing. But asking the poor to subsidize the rich strikes this writer as morally wrong.

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.

This day will come. I look forward to it. Progress is a beautiful thing to behold. But these kinds of transitions can only happen from the bottom up. He is demanding that it be top-down, which is the same thing as demanding that it never happen at all. Top-down is how Solyndra happened. Top-down is how ethanol happened.

Top-down is also an open invitation to the exact kind of cronyism that the Occupy Wall Street crowd – and this writer – despise. Again, think results, not intentions. The best way to achieve this policy goal is to make entrepreneurship and innovation easier. It’s a bottom-up world. Policies must acknowledge that if they are to succeed.

Demand six: One trillion dollars in infrastructure (Water, Sewer, Rail, Roads and Bridges and Electrical Grid) spending now.

He must be unfamiliar with the data. Government infrastructure spending is about 2.5 percent of GDP right now. That’s the highest it’s been since the 1950s, when the interstate highway system was being built. And today’s 2.5 percent is sliced from a pie that’s nearly 7 times larger in real terms. That puts current spending on par with about 17 percent of 1950 GDP. That is hardly austere.

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.

More unfamiliarity with the data. The EPA’s budget is currently a little over $10 billion. He demands a century’s worth of EPA spending over what one assumes is a period of years, not decades. That’s a lot of money that we don’t have.

Meanwhile, forest acreage today is roughly what it was a hundred years ago, despite U.S. population growing four-fold. And getting rid of dams and nuclear power plants means using more coal and natural gas. That’s what economists call a tradeoff. And that tradeoff directly contradicts Demand Five.

Demand eight: Racial and gender equal rights amendment.

Just such an Amendment passed on July 9, 1868. The Fourteenth Amendment reads, in part, “nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” Emphasis added, though the egalitarian language is clear enough on its own. Perhaps he should press for more consistent enforcement of that language. That certainly has been lacking.

Demand nine: Open borders migration. anyone can travel anywhere to work and live.

Yes. I don’t have a problem with background checks to keep out recidivist criminals or terrorists who, while rare, would hurt other people. And screening people for communicable diseases is a reasonable public health measure. But, like the Occupy Wall Street crowd, I don’t think anyone should presume the moral authority to tell other people where they may live, work, or travel. Right on.

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.

Mandatory recounts are a bit much; most Congressional elections are 60-40 or 70-30 affairs. But there’s not much to object to here. Though there will come a time when computerized voting machines will be harder to corrupt than paper ballots. He should instead demand honest vote counts, whatever the medium.

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.

Do this and no one will ever lend again. This demand has so little understanding of basic human nature, let alone basic economics, that it frankly doesn’t deserve serious scrutiny. It just sounds like he wants all the trappings of a modern first-world lifestyle without paying for them. As the economist Deirdre McCloskey would say: no, dear.

Demand twelve: Outlaw all credit reporting agencies.

Moody’s and the other ratings agencies played a starring role in inflating the housing bubble. Oh, they deserve plenty of blame. But the solution isn’t to outlaw them. It’s to outlaw Congress from giving them special treatment. Congressional coddling allowed them to lie to their customers and not get punished by market mechanisms. Their legally protected oligopoly is an outsized example of crony capitalism. Don’t confuse it with the real thing.

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.

Government policy should be neutral towards labor unions. Not hostile, not favorable. Neutral. Part of that neutrality means ensuring secret ballot elections when workers are deciding whether to unionize. If the ballots are open, it’s pretty easy to imagine both management and unions putting pressure on workers to sign with their side. Better to preserve anonymity. Let workers express their true feelings without fear of reprisal from either side.

This demand’s wording is unclear on neutrality, and unclear on secret ballots. Hard to tell what to make of it.

So there you have it.

Like almost any list of demands, there is good and bad here. Two common themes animate the list. One is that the writer clearly hasn’t studied economics. Free trade promotes wealth and peace, and has almost zero net effect on employment in the long-run. High minimum wages price the lowest-skilled employees out of work, and hurt them. There is no free lunch. Nobody will lend money if they aren’t going to be paid back.

None of those statements are controversial inside the profession, only out of it. Regardless of one’s political leanings.

The second theme is entitlement. Other people should pay for my health care. Other people should pay for my college education. I shouldn’t have to pay back my credit card balance. In short, gimme. How millennial.

The tea party movement’s uninformed populism is embarrassing to many on the right. No wonder Brendan O’Neill, seeing the same phenomenon on the left, wrote in The Telegraph that “The teenage moralism of the Occupy Wall Street hipsters almost makes me ashamed to be Left-wing.”

I agree with some of their demands, but it’s hard to see the Occupy Wall Street crowd being taken seriously. For that, they must first be able to be taken seriously. Given the movement’s lack of policy knowledge, its unseemly thirst for other people’s money, and the fact that some of them actually think that standing in the middle of a bridge invalidates their opponents’ arguments (!), they have a ways to go.

For being in their 20's they sure have a lot of "grievances". I could think of a few of my own... the way we got booted due to a landlord foreclosure for example. Who to blame? I personally blame the guy collecting the rent money who blew it on himself, instead of paying the freakin mortgage. No, these kids think its easier to blame banks... and who wouldn't be mad at the way banks charge this fee and that fee? I once cut my card up and mailed it back to Key after closing my account because of this.

Was I on the public dole? NO!!!! I was WORKING!!!!!!!!!!! Maybe not as many hours as I wanted but I was WORKING. Who was my boss? Uncle Sam. Think he would have smiled and patted me on my ass if I had shown up to work with a picket sign? Um... not bloody likely.

Show up at a protest or rally? Who me??? Not unless it really truly was something that mattered to me, and right now its making sure that the 99% say what THEY have to say, not what a bunch of twenty something picketers say they have to say.

Old Synapse is going to be here LOOOOOOOOOOOOONG after these college dropouts head back to mommy and daddy's basements. I just dont have a lot of sympathy for people beaten by the cops, that took out a bunch of student loans for a useless education, then were aghast that their weed smoking would not help them pay it back.

If they truly hoped to make a difference they could start protesting where it mattered. The White House and both houses of Congress... whose members took the campaign contributions from corporate lobbyists to begin with. And now that the Democraps are wanting to slip into bed with these guys plus the American Nazi and Communist parties.... it's starting to look irrelevant.

That, or its simply a bunch of paid agitators hired to give the impression that Big Brother needs to crack down on all of us. Maybe not a bad thing, lets give the Police something to do other than let rapists go free????

Anyway... if these protests end with the first 15 foot snowfall... I called it ;)

STUPID COPS PART TWO

http://www.syracuse.com/news/index.ssf/2011/10/an_open_and_shut_case_against.html


Mastho Davis always knew.
He knew that in January 1996 he wandered into a stranger’s apartment in Clay and pounded Christina Gristwood in the head three times with a hammer he found on the counter. He left her brain-damaged and paralyzed on one side.
Seven years later, he tried to confess to Onondaga County jail deputies while he was held on a different assault. Later, he tried to admit in open court that he beat Gristwood, but the judge kept resisting the confession.
Davis was crazed and violent, but he had a conscience. In August 2003, he tried again. He walked into the Syracuse Police Department late one night and again told officers he’d beaten a woman with a hammer in 1996.
It’d be another two years before a judge finally accepted what Davis knew all along.
But for all those years, someone else knew the truth, too.
Christina’s husband, Daniel Gristwood, seethed in prison. A judge, jury and prosecutor had sent him there for the crime, persuaded by a false confession coerced by state police investigators.
“I’ve lost everything in my life – my wife, my children, my job, my freedom, everything,” Daniel Gristwood wrote in a letter from prison. “Why am I being railroaded like this?”