Occupy Wall Street When the Occupy Wall Street movement began in the middle of September, I couldnt help

but dismiss it as a fad that was being sustained purely by the media exposure created due to a lack of anything important happening that week. But instead of quietly dimming down like a campfire running out of fuel, it managed to turn into a forest fire that has spread across America. It went from a small gathering around a private park into a movement that supposedly embodies 99% of America. As somebody who is financially part of the 99%, I intellectually support the 1%. There are many of others like me, but regard the protesters as a nuisance. We remain silent and continue with our daily routine, because we have more important things to do with our lives than contemplate what we perceive as fantasies of the left. As a student of history, I remember that all of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again. The dismissive silence of the moderates is an open invitation to the Occupy minority to act like the voice of a majority. It may be extreme to make such comparisons, but nonetheless it is important to recall that the totalitarian dystopias of twentieth century Europe were not created because of the virtue of the totalitarians, but because, in the words of Martin Niemller, "when they came for me, there was no one left to speak up." It is our fault that the protesters are allowed to claim they represent us. It is our responsibility to break our vows of silence and refute the protesters, lest their demands turn into our reality. In the end, history shows us that there is no difference between the man who chooses to be silent and the man who is forced to be silent. Louis XVI and Nicholas II both wrote in their diaries that nothing happened on the days their respective revolutions began; eventually the revolutions made sure they couldnt write anything in their diaries at all. The destiny of the Occupy Wall Street movement will be decided by how decisive us moderates are in their opposition to the irrationality in the demands of the protesters. This is my refutation. The media and right commentators have made it a habit of pointing out the demographics of the OWS protesters, trying to create a perception of them as hippie rabble. While I agree with Lenin that history is made by men and not by the masses, I refuse to be foolish enough to become Marie Antoinette by dismissing them and telling the angry rabble to go eat cake. By mocking the identity of the protesters, the right is making the same mistake as the OWS protesters. They are implying that the nature of a mans being is essential to how valuable his ideas are. The result is a nonsensical shouting match where one side becomes blind to the arguments being made and can only see his opponent as a collection of prejudices. Let us not fall into such a trap and separate the protesters proper from their demands, and judge those ideas only the virtue of their worth to mankind. The demands of the OWS have one common theme: government intervention in the market to correct perceived imbalances in the balance of power between the

wealthy and the rest of Americans. Some of the troubling implications of these demands are that large government activity in peoples daily life is desirable, redistribution of wealth towards equalization is necessary for economic justice and that capitalism is a broken system which must be repaired. These three points are essential to the OWS demands, because removing any one of them causes their position to fall apart. Removing only one of them would be enough to discredit the protesters, but luckily for us all three are vulnerable to attack. The desire for enlargement of government activities through the expansion of social welfare projects is frightening because it is so contradictory to what empirical evidence in the real world teaches us. The expansion of government activity since the 1990s is a big reason for our budget deficit. The government made pension and health care promises that it wont be able to keep. The government offered government employees salaries that it wont be able to pay. The government went to wars that it wasnt ready to fight. The idea that the government can provide everything to everybody at a comfortable price and without any strings attached is a myth. But what about Europe, surely they have been able to create a socialist society that works? Look at the wonderful maternity benefits women get in France, the high employment numbers of German workers, and the quality of education in Sweden! In fact, the Danes are so happy with the public works created by their 67% individual tax rate, that in polls they show they would be glad to be taxed even more. Even business schools are seduced by the promises, NYU Stern using the Danish flexicurity system of labor retraining as a model of an alternative to American-style capitalism. However, this European socialist utopia is a mirage, because all of these benefits come with often subtle prices that are rarely mentioned by the left. One major problem with increasing tax rates is that it provides incentives to the most mobile members of society to leave the country for greener pastures. The salaries and employment rates for European expatriates in America are significantly higher than for their counterparts in Europe. The result is a net outflow of educated workers, and a net inflow of poorly educated immigrants, creating a brain drain in Europe. This emigration of the flower of European education is unsustainable in the long term. Increasing taxes to create the revenue needed for social benefits would not only drive away educated Americans, it would also deter other professionals from immigrating to America. Continuing pressure from Asia on the manufacturing sector in America has sealed our fate; just as we had to wean ourselves off agriculture during industrialization, we will have to do the same with manufacturing. We will have to increase the number of educated workers in the American industry; overbearing government presence in the marketplace can only be detrimental to this goal. In addition, Europeans themselves are beginning to acknowledge that they cant support the extraordinary benefits the socialist state promises. Oftentimes, once a bureaucracy reaches a critical mass, its only objective becomes to ensure its survival through further increases in its size. Greece and the rest of the PIIGS are a perfect example of how nations with large bureaucracies become inefficient and corrupt.

German unions are forcing their members to cut the number of hours they work in order to prevent layoffs, which keeps employment figures artificially high. France had to increase the retirement age from 60 to 62, acknowledging that it wouldnt be able to provide the benefits it promises with the old figure. When the OWS protesters are beginning to admire the European socialist system, the systems architects are beginning to understand how flawed it really is. Further, the belief that America immediately needs redistribution of wealth through taxation is unconvincing. We are in the worst recession faced by the American economy since the Great Depression and can no longer use monetary policy to stimulate the economy due to interest rates approaching 0%. Increasing taxes is certainly going to slow down the recovery; arguments from the left that taxes would stimulate the economy by plugging the budget deficit and increasing stability have almost no empirical evidence. Many of the OWS protesters argue that John Maynard Keynes has failed us and that we have to create a new system of thinking. Keynesian economics argues that governments should save when the economy is doing well, and use these savings to compensate for slacking private sector investment during downturns. We shot ourselves in the foot by spending during a boom period, when instead we should have been saving. Keynesian economics didnt fail us, but rather we failed Keynesian economics. It would be insane to shoot the other foot as well by decreasing private sector investment during a recession. When Roosevelt decided to increase taxes in order to preserve the budget surplus in the mid 1930s despite Keynes protests, the countrys recovery reverted into an even bigger decline. Furthermore, while the deficit is a great concern for the future, it is a medium term problem since foreign governments like China will be willing to continue lending to us for at least another decade, since a decline in American consumption would be disastrous for Chinese growth (which in turn would be a disaster for the Chinese Communist Party, which relies on the growth to keep its citizens placated). If we dont concentrate on the recovery, any measures to plug the budget deficit are going to be futile due to lost taxes from the unemployed and increased expenses of paying benefits to these same jobless. In the distant future, increase in taxes make more sense, especially as a tool to quickly close the budget deficit and make America fiscally sound. I would support re-evaluating the lower taxes on capital gains, which are the real reason why the wealthy have lower effective individual tax rates than the rest of America, since they derive much of their income from equity. Finally, the argument that capitalism is a broken system and has to be fixed by populist legislation is absurd, because capitalism gives the consumer the ultimate power of choice. The protesters argue capitalism is broken because it encourages the businessman to make the maximum profit from the consumer. But how easily we forget the consumer wants to make the maximum profit from the businessman. Each transaction between business and customer is a gamble, each one making a bet on who is going to get more value from the purchase. If the protesters are upset with the profits that corporations are making and find them to be exploitation, they have the

right as consumers to pick a different vendor or to completely remove themselves from the market. If youre upset with the profits that financiers make, dont put your money in a large bank and open an account with a smaller local bank. If youre upset that banks have the power to foreclose on a mortgage, dont buy a mortgage so expensive that you dont have enough savings to afford the payments if you lose your job. If you find college education too expensive, dont go to a university that you think is too expensive. There are many state level colleges that provide an excellent education at a much lower cost than top tier universities. How can capitalism be a broken system, when it itself provides you with the tools to correct it? Instead of using their power as the consumer and influencing the market, the OWS protesters decided to take a fearless gamble. They forgot how fear is essential to survival, a creature without fear doesnt survive long in the wild. They bought houses that they couldnt afford. They went to universities they should have avoided. They continued to give money to the same banks they despised. They behaved like slaves who angrily carry their chains, but are at the same time afraid of living without them. And when their gamble didnt pay off, they decided it wasnt their responsibility that they lost, as if they were coerced by the corporations into making these choices. They chose to play the game, but now theyre angry because theyre not winning now. Theyre no longer having fun, so they dont want to play this game anymore. You cant win a war without risking defeat. You cant feel love without risking pain. You cant gain without risking loss. The conscious trade-off between opportunity and safety is something we weigh in every decision of our lives and is integral to human freedom. Capitalism has been successful primarily because it rewards those who make wise gambles and abstain from unwise ones. Like evolution, the core tenet of life, capitalism weeds out companies that are unfit to compete. If a corporation is overly profitable, it is not because they exploit their customers, but because the customers fail to exploit the corporation. I want to conclude by pointing out that I am not completely against the Occupy Wall Street movement. I support their belief that the banks have not been properly punished for their failure to foresee and prevent the mortgage bubble. The consensus among economists, and even financiers themselves, seems to be an agreement that the Dodd-Frank Act does very little to fix the problems that gave rise to this recession. Which raises the question, why are they occupying Wall Street? Shouldnt they be protesting at the National Mall or the White House lawn in Washington, DC? It was the government that, starting in the 1970s, began an irresponsible push for putting every American into their own home by promoting unrealistic mortgages. It was the government that decided to give the banks a bailout without stipulating strict and specific strings. It was the government that failed to properly regulate these banks in the aftermath of 2008. It was the government that got the US credit rating degraded, because it wasnt willing to compromise on a budget deficit plan because of their egos. Shouldnt the movement be called Occupy Main Street?