Who has noticed the irony that the Occupy Wall Street movement is demanding greater income equality at a time in history when welfare payments are at their highest ever levels? Never before has so much been taken from so few to be given to so many.
Yes - by liberals...
In developed nations, governments take wealth from those who have it and redistribute it via health care providers, unemployment checks, low income credits, government bureaucracies, corporate bailouts, industrial subsidies, supposedly green investments and a welter of other social and welfare programs.
In the United States, the top five per cent of earners pay more income tax than the bottom 95 per cent combined, by a ratio of approximately 60 to 40. They take in only a third of adjusted gross income.
Apparently this is not enough.
You want to really reduce wealth? You’ve got it. High tax payments are one thing but something much more pernicious is looming around the corner. The impact of massive government borrowing to finance these programs is poised to be exposed to the middle classes as theft on a much grander scale.
This will be demonstrated when Greece finally defaults on the back of its welfare debt. When the drachma is reintroduced, it will be worth so much less than the Euro that Greek assets values – pensions, savings, property, businesses, etc. – will free-fall.
Permanent currency devaluation is the perfect solution for those liberal intellectuals who find compassion in picking other people’s pockets. It is theft by stealth. Greeks will wake up to discover that their holdings were not so secure after all. Their wealth already has been “redistributed”. Spent. Gone.
With three record post-war budget deficits and $15 trillion in accumulated debt, Barack Obama’s America is on the same trajectory. Today’s welfare is tomorrow’s robbed pension fund and empty cashbox.
Dependency has taken away the very thing that its proponents claim to offer – hope. Hope comes not from endless welfare but from responsibility and self-reliance. Welfare recipients see little hope for advancement. They have been permanently enslaved.
As the Occupy Wall Street and copycat protesters have demonstrated, nobody is satisfied. There never can be enough redistribution and government welfare to satisfy the aspirations of recipients and egalitarians. An ever expanding sub-culture of dependency has been created that demands ever greater handouts to mitigate the inherent misery from relying on government welfare. The circle is complete.
Occupy Everywhere is a cry for help. It boils down to protests not against wealth or bankers, but against the failings of liberal policies.
Young people in particular are being squeezed by a system that offers little or no prospect for them to prosper as individuals. This is the system that has been created.
How will teenagers respond when they work out that their legacy already has been spent by the political classes? Will they want to grab their share of what is left? Will they comprehend that the more wealth that can be commandeered from others, the less hope they will have of ever escaping dependency themselves? Will there be a backlash against government and in favor of capitalism?
The lesson of Occupy Everywhere is that welfare should be a hand up, not a hand out. The government trough is no nirvana.
A well thought through take on the current ‘Occupy’ scene. I am not sure that the Europe will reintroduce the drachma but who knows what the eventual results will be from the machinations of our political neighbours.
Well put, Gavino. The occupiers have lost a lot of grey matter from all the drugs they’ve done and are nothing but simple minded agitators. They know how to harass and get news coverage. They have such a muddled message and are such hypocrites, they make my blood boil… They certainly DON’T represent the main stream!