A kinship with John Adams

I just started watching HBO's John Adams miniseries, I'm only past the first episode and there's something that resonates deeply with me, and it's extremely relevant to today.

Adams was tasked with defending the British soldiers charged with the Boston Massacre, who behaved as police in a colony fueled with hatred of the British government. When an angry mob began pelting the soldiers with clubs and sticks they eventually fired and killed five people. Adams proved in court that they acted in self defense, despite being the only ones with guns.

It's a Hell of a thing to watch that while people around you respond to the Michael Brown shooting by making the strange claim that police shouldn't be allowed to shoot unarmed or knife-wielding assailants even when they are being attacked and are in mortal danger.

After that, we see Adams grow more and more frustrated with the heavy hand of the British government, but also feel revolted by the brutal violence carried out by ghoulish mobs and advocated by rabble-rousers. He wanted to live in a nation of laws, not one of thuggery and street violence.

Cue the militarization of police, Occupy Wall Street lawlessness and Cliven Bundy's needless armed standoff.

I'm glad I'm not the only one who both opposes a tyrannical government but rejects savagery as the response. I just hope most of the other people who feel this way didn't die 200 years ago.


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Looking back on Occupy Wall Street

This week marks the one year anniversary of the Occupy Wall Street and I wanted to share some brief reflections on the movement.

I knew that this was a polarizing issue and wanted to judge things for myself so last year I visited three different protest camps within the movement to talk to people about why they participated. As expected, what I saw was different from the way others painted the movement. The American left naively portrayed the protests as noble, courageous and reasonable while the right skewed what the protesters stood for.

As can be expected, I came out in opposition to the protests. The version portrayed by the political right was closer to my perception, but still inaccurate. Conservative commentators said the protesters just wanted free services and money from the government. There were those types, but there were plenty of people that felt they were being screwed over by corporate influence on the government and just wanted it to stop. Right or wrong, that's not the same as wanting a handout. None of the camps I went to were love-fests for the Democrats either.

There were some legitimate complaints raised by the protesters at the beginning. The bank bailouts were an early central issue and I was on the same side as the protesters. The calls to end the Federal Reserve or burden it with more government oversight were dead on too.

There were also a lot of young people with college tuition debt and my heart goes out to them. They followed the path recommended to them by the public education system, that if they graduate from college with any degree that they will find a good paying job and be better off. Now we have a slew of young people with worthless degrees and crushing debt while the available job openings require specific skills no one has. That's a legitimate complaint and I hope it taught them to question the wisdom of government authorities.

Despite those reasonable complaints, the movement was started by anti-capitalist lawbreakers and that element proved to be a liability. The whole premise was to trespass by camping out in public parks until the police pull them out. The Marxists always spoke up and declared the group wanted to end capitalism, harvest the rich and end the concept of property rights.

The lack of property rights did a lot of damage to the movement. Thieves, rapists and parasites infiltrated their camps and caused lots of internal damage, but without a formal ability to restrict access the serious protesters had few options to deal with them.

Wikipedia gives the protests a body count of 32 deaths. Vandalism and violence were common, but these elements were usually excused by moderate liberal supporters who projected their own values on the movement to the point of being naive and blind. Actions like shutting down West Coast ports only make sense if your goal is to destroy. The alliance between progressives, anarchists and socialists always forces moderates to defend bomb-throwers or break away.

They failed to back up one of their central claims with evidence, that the top 1 percent of income earners have shaped policies to suit their own needs at the expense of everyone else. Their popular claim that the top 1 percent pays a lower federal income tax rate than the middle class is completely false, even when capital gains and dividends are included as income.

Physically, the Occupy protests were reckless frat parties with obnoxious drumming as a heartbeat. When the weather started getting cold I saw them take on the mood of the Donner Party, but it's hard to deny that some of the original appeal was to have fun with free-spirited people.

Towards the end the focus of the protests seemed to be on itself. Occupy protests were suddenly about the right to camp overnight in public parks without permits. This was mischaracterized as a free speech issue and the villains turned from rich bankers and Wall Street executives to middle class unionized police officers.

Ultimately, The Occupy protests were a magic mirror that allowed people to see what they wanted. Conservatives saw lazy, selfish leeches; Anarchists and socialists saw a popular uprising that they hoped would crush capitalism as predicted by Marx; and progressives saw an enthusiastic movement that could rival the Tea Party and advance the cause of the Democratic Party. None of these were completely true, but they all had true elements.
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They clearly are hooligans

Whenever groups of celebrities band together on a political issue, ignorance and empty words will soon follow. The international support for the band Pussy Riot is a perfect example, but the issue is more complex than simply saying it's right or wrong to arrest them.

A group of women went to the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow wearing pastel ski masks and stomped around the altar singing a vulgar thrash song criticizing the church's cozy relationship with President Vladimir Putin. They got tossed out and were later arrested, convicted of "Hooliganism" and last week they were sentenced to serve two years for the stunt.

Judge Marina Syrova ruled Friday that the band members had "committed hooliganism driven by religious hatred." She rejected the women's arguments that they were protesting the Russian Orthodox Church's support for Putin and didn't intend to offend religious believers.

Here's where everything starts cracking up. Clearly this wasn't about hatred of the church, but of its embrace of Putin. That's a legit thing to complain about if it's true, so in that sense I agree with them.

But just look at the stunt they pulled. They were clearly making a large disturbance and deserve some form of punishment, despite the wishy-washy nonsense people try to spin to defend these tactics like this post on CNN:

...For What? Performing a peaceful protest song in a Russian Orthodox Cathedral that lasted less than a minute. 

Most agreed that the court wouldn't rule in the women's favor; they themselves had predicted a guilty verdict. Already, Russian authorities had unjustly detained these women, stealing them away from their families and children, and orchestrated a legal process that tiptoed the line on international fair trial standards.  

Say what you will about Pussy Riot: this might not be your kind of music. Their actions might offend you. But this doesn't change the fact that freedom of expression, in whatever peaceful form it takes, is a human right, and one on which the protection of other rights rests.

The song would have lasted longer if burly guards weren't on hand to pull them out. I hardly find that to be a "peaceful" song, but the content of the song is completely irrelevant because they did not have the right to be there. A moronic post from a Communist was mocked for opposing Pussy Riot only because they criticized Putin.

This silly idea of protests overruling property rights and trespassing restrictions is a talking point for Pussy Riot defenders. Just like how the ability for a city to close a park at night magically became illegitimate the moment Occupy Wall Street protesters showed up, modern liberals have fallen in love with the idea that breaking the rules becomes acceptable when someone staples a political message to it.

But does anyone really believe this? Would the supporters of Pussy Riot also oppose punishing a group of same-sex marriage opponents who stormed the stage of a gay rights conference and shouted vulgar political slogans? What about a group of young Republicans who ran into the pulpit of a black church to denounce President Obama with filthy limericks?

Clearly, a crime of some kind has been committed, and "hooligan" seems like an apt description. Two years in jail seems a bit harsh, so I'm willing to believe they got hit harder then they deserve because it was about Putin. It's ridiculous to demand they should be let off Scot-free. The only room for debate should be what level of punishment is appropriate.
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Utilitarianism for the greater evil

Good ideas have a tendency to crash and burn when they move from the textbook to the streets.

Like every former Philosophy 101 student, I accepted utilitarianism's call to commit a limited amount of evil in order to vanquish a larger evil. The classic case is the "innocent fat man" where a group of people are stuck in a cave that is starting to flood from high tide. An innocent fat man becomes stuck in the only exit, and the only way to save the lives of the innocent people is to dynamite porky.

There's also the trolley problem, where five people standing on railroad tracks are oblivious to a speeding train, and the only way to save them is to throw the switch and redirect the train to another track where it will kill one person instead of five.

Of course, it's never that simple in real life. These fables assume godlike knowledge of the situation. What if the cave was only going to flood knee-deep levels and there were small holes to breath from? What if the five people on the train tracks weren't oblivious to the train or were planting a bomb?

They also assume a dichotomy of actions. Do nothing, or kill. There's no option to swim out of the cave, wait for rescuers or warn the people on the tracks.

Case in point a video posted this morning of far-left leaders discussing rioting and violence as ways to achieve their goals. This wasn't a collection of ground level recruits who said something idiotic or atypical. This was a public meeting last month at the New School in New York City about what the goals and tactics of the Occupy Wall Street movement should be. After some generic anti-capitalist nonsense, activist leader Yotam Marom said:

Why are we, like harassing ourselves about broken windows and bombs when we should be talking about police brutality... I don't even want to get into the questions of whether it's ethical or not ethical to use violence in such and such. That's why I said earlier that it's about context... This system is incredibly violent and no amount of broken windows will ever add up to the misery of loss of human potential that these systems of oppression have yielded.

Marom and several other speakers at the summit invoked utilitarianism as a justification for violence. They believe that the system, man is so evil that it's excusable to use violence to reach their political goals.

If there's one lesson we can take from the Soviet Union, it should be how much evil can be heaped upon the innocent in a bloody quest to rid the world of an imagined devil. There is no one alive who can evaluate the suffering caused by murderers like Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin and say that was a better society than one that would have existed under capitalism.

And just like those communist murderers, the violent far-left is eager to spill blood to fight capitalism because they believe it causes more evil. This is what utilitarianism has brought the world.

This is the secular version of holy genocides carried out by religious men who committed atrocities in the name of a peaceful god. Every religious war is an exercise in utilitarianism. People who consider themselves good and just will become butchers when fooled into believing their actions are justified because of words written in a book, be it the Bible, the Quran or Mao's Little Red Book.

These utilitarian thugs assume they understand how the world works perfectly. People like Marom are so confident that capitalism is an evil that they are willing to injure or even kill people. Utilitarianism plus ignorance equals innocent victims.

When you ask people if a violent action would be justified to stop the Nazi war machine in World War II, and then turn that logic to stopping a peaceful system like capitalism, you end up creating evil in the name of a greater evil.

Utilitarianism also assumes false dichotomies, such as violent actions or peaceful protests are the only options. They think their violence will be more effective than peaceful actions and haven't considered that there is a world of other ways to reach their goals.

The same fallacies apply to the few cases of abortion doctor assassinations and the idea that we should torture a suspected terrorist to prevent a future attack. How do you know for sure he's a terrorist and that he can provide information to stop an attack? Torture use sounds great on paper, but it gets murky when you factor in the potential innocence of the suspect.

In theory, utilitarianism is a compromise for the greater good. It can do good things like help the poor and save lives. But in practice, it becomes the ultimate act of hubris. It justifies human sacrifices in the names of false gods. We are all flawed thinkers, but it assumes perfect information.

Utilitarianism carries a great potential for evil and should be handled like plutonium. It can improve things when used responsibly, but when combined with ignorance it makes the world far worse.
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Don't claim to speak for other people

I don't think there's a mug of cocoa chocolaty enough or filled with enough marshmallows for me to me to read the comment section of a liberal blog without losing my happy mood.

Case in point a set of links Michael Hawkins shared with me on Facebook today. I couldn't make it through the first comment section without groaning to myself about how much I can't stand liberals - despite the irony that liberal Mr. Hawkins sent me the link with the same disagreement.

As I've written before, there's a faction in scientific skepticism that is trying to force political correctness onto the movement. They play the same old card, dividing the world neatly into feminists and misogynists. They make the unfalsifiable claim that the reason we men can't recognize the problems they claim are there is our male privilege, so we need to be silent and do whatever they tell us.

Yesterday a woman named Mallorie Nasrallah wrote a short essay saying these people don't speak for her. She's a woman who's been in the skeptical community for a long time and disagrees with everything the feminist faction is claiming.

The feminists didn't take it lying down and argued back, a bit viciously. Mallorie replied. What bothers me here isn't that Mallorie was criticized. No, that's part of the deal when you speak up. Criticism is a form of free speech, not tyranny. They had every right to fight back.

What bothers me here is that Mallorie had to frame it this way in the first place because other people were claiming to speak for her. That is the abuse of power.

It's no secret that I'm critical of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Most of their anger is directed at other people, but one thing that has always bothered me is their claim to speak for 99 percent of Americans. Polls have always shown that a smaller percent of the population support them. They claim they speak for people like me when they really don't.

I went through the same thing when I was on unemployment, where well-off progressives claimed they spoke for me when they wished to extend unemployment benefits. I opposed them, and I take it personally when people misrepresent themselves as speaking on my behalf.

Other people can argue is Mallorie is right or wrong, but one thing that is not up for debate is where she stand on the issue. She's a grown woman, let her speak for herself.
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Mic check!

Like most aspiring pundits, I enjoy Googling things just to make myself upset. That's why I just ended up doing a news search just to see what Michael Moore has been up to. I clicked on exactly two articles about him and the contrast was beautiful.

One was a list of suggestions he made for organized trespassers and the other was his cancellation of a comedy festival he helped organize out of fear that drunks from a brew fest would trickle in again.

Here's a quote from each:

Students should spend this winter doing what they are already doing on dozens of campuses -- holding sit-ins, occupying the student loan office, nonviolently disrupting the university regents meetings, and pitching their tents on the administration's lawn.

You may have noticed my introduction of a bold font at one point. Prepare to see it again.

...A number of shows were interrupted by drunks who had been to the beer fest and decided to visit the Comedy Fest for some yucks. Unfortunately, no one told them that the audience was there to see the famous comedians we brought in, and not them in their happily inebriated state. We didn't have to deal with this in our first year, when we were a stand-alone event. In our second year, anticipating problems, we had paid security, but we didn't have enough to deal with the disruptions...

An unwanted loud band of drunks competing for the spotlight sounds like the right medicine for Moore's comedy festival. It's too bad he canceled it, the irony would have been the best part of the show.
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What's the real Occupy theme song

The band NOFX wrote a sympathetic anthem for the Occupy Wall Street movement, but the lyrics are the same old drivel. These platitudes don't cover what the movement is really about - a loose alliance of radical anti-capitalists and mainstream liberals so eager to protest a grab bag of progressive talking points that they're willing to tolerate law breaking.



"The Trees" by Rush is tempting. It's a metaphor for progressive "fairness" polices told through a group of trees that aren't getting enough sunlight because of the tall oaks.

So the maples formed a union
And demanded equal rights
"These oaks are just too greedy
We will make them give us light"
Now there's no more oak oppression
For they passed a noble law
And the trees are all kept equal
By hatchet, axe, and saw

The lyrics do a great job of showing how progressive economic policies end up destroying wealth, not simply redistributing it, and are inherently unfair. However, it's not targeted to protests and isn't specific enough to be considered a theme song for the Occupy organized trespassing movement.



This one is too easy and plenty of other people have made the connection for "Bang the Drum All Day" by Todd Rundgren. The lyrics don't matter because all everyone knows is the chorus:

I don't want to work
I want to bang on the drum all day

This one isn't fair. While the movement is maggoty with lazy non-stop drummers, it's not fair to say the core of the group doesn't want to work. Most of the protesters want to perform labor under a different economic system. Plenty of sympathetic college grads majored in "fun" things like literature or music that don't prepare them for obtainable careers and while they bear some responsibility for their foolishness, it's still hard to find work for everyone.

That's why I distance myself from other critics who say the protesters want the government to provide everything for them and just need to get a job. Most of them want to work and can't find it.



"Baby, I'm an Anarchist" by Against Me! is a radical protester telling a progressive that they may be on the same side of a few issues, but the progressive underestimates how extreme anarchist positions and tactics are and the two will never see eye to eye.

'Cause baby, I'm an anarchist
You're a spineless liberal
We marched together for the eight-hour day
And held hands in the streets of Seattle
But when it came time to throw bricks
Through that Starbucks window
You left me all alone (All alone)

This song plainly spells out to progressives that the anarchists don't respect them, don't believe the current system can be reformed and are eager to use violence. It'd a great choice for the movement's theme song, however a more fitting song exists.



"Anarchy means you litter" by Atom and His Package is the perfect song to criticize spoiled pre-packaged anarchists.

I got a patch. I got a pin
Obtained political beliefs from the same songs as my friends
I got a five finger discount to the little record store
It's easier to get the stuff I want out

And if you want fair compensation for the work that you do
Well then your greedy, get out, we have amazing names to call you
Ever think there's a difference who you're stealing from?
So, fine, I'm not punk and you are (a moron)

We're gonna tear this stupid city down
Throw our trash on the ground
Liberate that bottle of malt liquor!
Oh, I get it. Anarchy means that you litter (nice!)

So, if you're flying the flag, and you're naming the name
Then you're setting back the ones who know how to behave
It's a good thing this replenishes itself
Or who would be left to take advantage of your "help?"

Consider it a frustrated liberal speaking back to the clueless bomb throwers who learned everything they know from song lyrics and hurt their own allies.

Loyal readers, if you know of a more fitting song, please post it below.
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Occupy Maine: The honeymoon is over

I visited Maine for Thanksgiving weekend and stopped by the Occupy protests in Augusta and Portland to spend some more time talking to the protesters about whats important to them.

The two Maine encampments were a stark contrast to the energetic Occupy Boston protest I visited when the movement was still young. The protesters seemed somewhat bored with the whole thing and perhaps resented the snow on the ground.

A substantial amount of the protesters focus has shifted from issues like income inequality and corporate personhood to the movement itself.

The first person I talked to at Occupy Augusta on Friday was Jarody, a tea party protester and former Republican candidate for the state house. When I asked him what are the important issues, he said the most important thing he cares about is that the Occupy movement is not hijacked by established political groups. That is to say, his primary interest in this protest is that he wants to participate in a protest with a degree of purity untouched by outsider organizations, or protesting for the sake of protesting as long as it's pure.

I also heard a lot of calls about free speech and the right to protest. Jarody and other protesters tried to dodge when I asked them about the legality of their tent city in the park and said they have a day-to-day understanding with the capital police. This is odd because the whole point is to illegally occupy land to attract attention, then play the victim card when police enforce the law.

They called a meeting while I was there with fellow bloggers Nate and Michael Hawkins announcing that capital police told them the eviction notice is coming Monday. The person leading the meeting, possibly named Lou, said he had been waiting five or six weeks to be arrested here, and the time was finally coming. He told the other members to call more people in to be arrested with them.

"They're be a lot of people coming here who will want to be arrested," he added. It reinforced my view that the left sees being arrested as a martyrdom, and uses these self-made martyrs to convince the gullible that the police are cracking down on them for their views, not for trespassing.

One person said during the meeting that if the police pepper spray him, he will spray them back. This person was clearly an idiot, and to the groups credit, the idiot was told he can't do that.

As of this time, Nate reports that the camp in Augusta is still around. Over the weekend nine people were arrested for hopping the fence of the governors mansion and stringing up a banner, but none of them were there Friday.

The protesters I talked to said if the police told them to leave or be pepper sprayed, they'd choose to be pepper sprayed.

One issue that united the 15 members of the Occupy Augusta was an opposition to genetically-modified food. They were picking at two roasted turkeys still sitting in their pans. One of them was filled with potatoes, mushrooms and onions (I assume it was a gluten-free attempt at stuffing) and it was obviously the cook's first bird: it was left sitting in two inches of congealed fat and the paper packet of internal organs was left inside when it was cooked.

The Augusta encampment had a teepee for sleeping in the center surrounded by smaller tents. The communal tent had brand-new metal shelves that organizes said were donated. There was a left-wing library, picnic tables, boxes of donated food and a few trays of loose tobacco for communal cigarettes. The system seemed to work, as there were only 15 people, but Nate said that number doubled to 30 when the police tried to clear it out today.

The most telling moment was when one of the protesters gave a long pour of table salt into a big cup, then came back a minute later to pour more and walked away. I said to Jarody, he's not salting the walkway with that, is he?

Jarody looked at me with wide eyes and said "Someone needs to stop him!"

I had a good time talking to the protesters in Boston and Augusta. I didn't enjoy the protest in Portland, known as Occupy Maine, when I stopped by Saturday at noon time.

I saw a group of about half a dozen people sitting lazily around a picnic table. No one was talking about I sat down with them and said I was a blogger originally from the area who wants to know what issues are important to them. One person asked what town I was from and then there was a big pause.

A wrinkled woman around age 60 glared at me and said I was being rude. She said I was interrupting them and went on (rudely) and insisted they were in the middle of talking. They weren't, but there's no point in arguing with crusty old hippies. I told the group that they're here to protest and identifying the issues they're protesting should be something they want to do.

I ended up talking to a young woman named Jenna, who was just there for the weekend. Jenna insisted the most Americans quality of life and standard of living had been dropping since the 1970s because of the rise in things like health care costs.

She said she knows it sounds crazy to say she's anti-capitalist, but wants to replace capitalism with a different economic system, although she said she doesn't know what to replace it with.

Another of her points was that the strength of the movement comes from not having a list of demands. She said she'd rather see a revolution that be promised demands that will never come.

That was all I was able to get out of the Portland group. I later learned why they've been on edge. The week before one of their members had attacked a critic, and two others choked and bludgeoned a third member for banging a drum at 7 a.m. On Thursday Jason Carr, the one who assaulted someone for disagreeing with their message as he tried to leave, was arrested again for domestic violence in the camp. A couple was also arrest for hitting one another and a third person was arrested for disorderly conduct.

One of my friends has been an organizers there from the start and he looked exhausted. After a quick talk he expressed frustration with running the group, which he said was like herding cats.
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I told you so

Last month I wrote:

The left has this habit of trying to get arrested, then looking at the arrests as a noble sacrifice and proof that the police are thugs. That doesn't mean that police never brutalize protesters, of course, but the protesters aren't always the victims they claim to be.

Yesterday at U.C. Davis trespassing protesters dug themselves in so police couldn't pull them apart and were told they would be pepper sprayed if they didn't disperse. You can guess what happened next.



Now left is are up in arms about police brutality, excessive force and freedom of speech - concepts they clearly don't understand. If you break the law and dare the police to enforce it, they will enforce it. It is an automated response, like pressing a button.

Non-gifted Associate Professor of English Nathan Brown penned a rambling letter calling for the university chancellor to resign for calling the police to remove the tresspassers. He offers this

The fact is: the administration of UC campuses systematically uses police brutality to terrorize students and faculty, to crush political dissent on our campuses, and to suppress free speech and peaceful assembly.

Here's my open letter to Nathan Brown:

Sir, you do not understand freedom of speech. With some narrow exceptions, the content of speech can not be censored. There are, however, limitations on time and place speech can be expressed as long as they are content-neutral. One can not hold a protest that blocks the lanes of an interstate highway, for example.

It doesn't matter if the protesters were non-violent, they were illegally "occupying" space they were not allowed to be. They linked their bodies in a way that made it impossible for the police to pull them apart without using something like pepper spray.

If the police catch me robbing a bank while singing "Born to Run," the police are not suppressing Bruce Springsteen music. Likewise, when people - students, kids, veterans or whatever kind of people they are - illegally trespass, it doesn't matter to the police why they are doing it. The police will use force before they'll tolerate law breaking.

And you knew this. Next time you feel like organizing a protest where participants break the law and dare the police to pepper spray them, I expect to see you on the front line.

-Michael

This is a bait-and-switch routine. The protesters break a law and act as if the police are after them for their beliefs. Anyone who believes this narrative is a sucker.
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Taxes are progressive enough

There is a lie being repeated that America has a regressive tax system, that the rich pay a lower percentage of their wealth than the middle class. Instead, we have a progressive tax system that has done a great job of keeping inequality in check.

As I've said before, there's nothing wrong with inequality. What we should focus on is the well-being of the poor, and the poor in America enjoy a high standard of living.

The recent Bruce Meyer episode of Econtalk made a compelling point that inequality is much lower than the pundits claim because they are merely looking at pre-tax income. Once you factor in taxes, consumer spending and government assistance programs like the earned income tax credit you see a much different picture observe.

Both the left and the right make the mistake of focusing on the top tax bracket in the past, which was higher than it is today, but affected few people. A much larger percentage of our federal taxes paid by the wealthy, and it's not just because they have more of the wealth. We are seeing lower taxes for the poor and middle class.

Enter Warren Buffet and the claim that he pays a lower tax rate than his secretary, whose income was never identified. He claimed he paid 17.4 percent while everyone else in his office pays 31 to 44 percent. Greg Mankiw said that isn't even true, but let's play along and say it is.

Is it fair for members of the left to use him as an example to "prove" that the rich pay a lower tax rate, like "Bob" did in an exchange we had in a comment section at For The Sake of Science last month? People rightly claim that taxpayers are able to use loopholes and write-offs to reduce their tax bill, and the rich have access to smart accountants who can exploit them, so could this stymie the progressiveness of the official tax rates?

The good news is that the hard data says otherwise. Using Warren Buffett as an anecdotal example is misleading, as we can see by looking at the effective federal tax rate that compares what people actually pay in taxes to their incomes. Here's what the Congressional Budget Office projected for this year:



It's plain to see that in reality, the five different quintiles fall neatly in line, with the top 1 percent that gets so much focus today paying the highest at 33.8 percent. It is a lie to say the rich pay less of a percentage of taxes than anyone else.

All is not lost for the left. They could simply abandon this bogus claim of a regressive tax system and instead focus on the gains that have come through lowering taxes for the poor and middle class and various "redistribution" programs like the earned income tax credit. That would allow them to sleep better at night instead of, in the words of Michael Munger, elevating the sin of envy to a virtue.
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Idiot Hunting OWS

The squirmy nature of Occupy Wall Street makes fair criticism a difficult task. Because there's no official list of demands, critics can pick the views expressed by the stupidest supporters and go to town on them, as if that disproves the entire movement.

I don't want to break my own rule on idiot hunting and prop up the ignorant as living straw men to dismantle. That's too easy.

For example, early on everyone was looking for a list of official demands and a list from the official website got passed around. Now it has a snarky introduction saying it's a forum post, not an official list. The intro criticizes people who interpreted the list as official, but the web design was so poor that it was impossible tell it was a forum post. It said it was a real list.

The list featured some silly ideas like declaring a minimum wage of $20 an hour, making huge government programs, canceling all student debt and outlawing credit reporting agencies. I could snap these ideas apart in my sleep, but that doesn't actually prove anything.

The real ideas to target are the calls to end corporate personhood, increase regulations and lower the income gap. That is real engagement and the only way to seriously combat this movement is to strike its strongest points. Kicking infants doesn't prove anything.

I've been more than fair in making the distinction between the violent bomb-throwing anarchists who started the protests from the liberal supporters who tolerate them. I personally wouldn't want to support a movement that overlooks calls for violence and illegal behavior, but that's their mistake to make.

It's also hard to make criticisms of the idiots stick, as the movement is so fragmented most supporters will just say they don't believe in that idea or move the goalpost to another issue if they do. Idiot hunting won't defeat OWS.

I will, however, mock stupid ideas when they make their way to the front of the pack. Take the idiot who left a cushy tenured position in the NYC school department to get a masters degree in puppets. He wanted to get an extra $10,000 annually by exploiting the salary guidelines, but the job was gone when he finished playing with puppets.

This person is clearly a fool, not a victim, and it would be pure idiot hunting to single him out as a typical Occupy Wall street protester. That is, it would be if The Nation hadn't done just that in a sympathetic piece written by their executive web editor.

It's not idiot hunting when the claim makers are the ones propping them up as a fair example. The Nation is about as disinterested and seperate from this movement as Nintendo Power is from Nintendo. This is completely fair game.

He thought he could use the teacher salary guidelines as a loophole to make an extra $10,000 a year with the puppets at the public's expense. That is, he got greedy, took a risky venture that backfired and now wants us to bail him out. As Angus put it:

If you decide to "pursue your passion" in an un-economic area, don't be surprised when the economic system doesn't value you highly, and don't think that the problem is the system; the problem is you.

Christ. Puppets? What an idiot.
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OWS fails to protest Greg Mankiw

I thought the theme of Occupy Someplace protesters was to stand around somewhere you're not supposed to be and dare the police to remove you, then complain about the police department's use of force.

Today Occupy Boston tried to do the opposite and get Greg Mankiw's entire Ec 10 class to walk out on him at 12:15 p.m. In an open letter, an organizer claimed the introductory course doesn't teach the type of economics they like.

A legitimate academic study of economics must include a critical discussion of both the benefits and flaws of different economic simplifying models. As your class does not include primary sources and rarely features articles from academic journals, we have very little access to alternative approaches to economics. There is no justification for presenting Adam Smith’s economic theories as more fundamental or basic than, for example, Keynesian theory.

What a ridiculous thing to say. Adam Smith is indeed the foundation of modern economics, and I imagine a low-level biology class treats Charles Darwin the same way and a creationist would try to cite a lack of academic journals in an argument for teaching rib-based origins. Someone else has written a more in-depth take down of this silly accusation, so I will outsource that aspect of my post.

I imagine this protest has little to do with the declared motivation and is really about his role as an economic advisor in the Bush administration and some of his mocking posts about the movement and challenges to their assumptions.

Regardless, the protest was a flop, as only five to 10 percent of the class participated, and that was offset by former students who occupied the class in support of Mankiw.

As Tyler Cowen wrote today, "OWS supporters should be embarrassed by this garbage behavior." They won't. Add this to the long list of shameful actions protesters have committed and moderate supporters have overlooked.

These moderate supporters, who I have gone to great lengths to distinguish from the bomb throwers, do not have clean hands. They are holding hands with violent thugs and have been cheering protesters on to resist when police try to remove them for trespassing. This is essentially taunting the police to enforce the law.

The moderates celebrated when New York police decided against enforcing the evacuation of the park, but when Oakland police used force they carried on the liar's cry of victimhood. Now that has spiraled into shutting down the Oakland port, and they still haven't lost the support of the herbivores.

Greg Mankiw has said he considers himself a diplomat of the economic literature to his students, and his goal is to share what major economists have discovered even if he doesn't agree with it. It's a shame that with the ignorance of these protesters, the one place they aren't willing to occupy is an economics class.
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Lying about police brutality

I'm trying to understand what the left thinks of police officers, and it doesn't make sense

One minute the police are hardworking union members. They are public servants who hold society together, and it's a scandal that Republicans and Tea Party members want to reduce or restrain taxes and risk putting them out of work.

The next minute the police are evil thugs who make unprovoked attacks on innocent protesters. These police officers can't stand the anti-rich and pro-union statements the peaceful Occupy Wall Street and anti-globalization protesters make and assault them.

For some reason, those same police officers don't get in fights with the low-tax anti-union right wing protesters. These same protesters who want to reduce the benefits of public employees, such as for the police department, are never brutalized.

I understand that there's a diversity of opinion on the left, and individual progressives should not be expected to hold views consistent with every other leftist.

But the logic still doesn't make sense if you believe the fable that modern American police are fascist thugs who make a habit of attacking left wing protesters. The simple answer is the protesters are lying.

We already know Occupy Wall Street is filled with people who want to smash things and fight the police. A third in a recent poll said they believe in violence to advance their goals. There's no great mystery here, the protesters are causing violence and then pretending to be the victims.
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Procedural liberalism requires consistency

I've been reading about "procedural liberalism" and the idea that all members of a just society must play by the rules, and I'm having trouble reconciling this with the actions and philosophy of the American left.

As I wrote last time, some members of the left purposely break the law to get arrested, then present themselves as martyrs. If you trespass while shouting to legalize human-onion marriage, you are not a victim of interkingdom romance puritanism. Your freedom of speech has not been trampled. You are simply someone who tried to hang out where they're not allowed to hang out.

"I Am Not Moving" is the title of the obnoxious video comparing Occupy Wall Street protesters to Arab Spring protesters, which is like comparing George of the Jungle to Tarzan. Despite this stern title, when you violate a no-trespass order and the blue-shirted union workers with black boots and billy clubs come for you, you are in fact moving.

If you supporting breaking the law as part of a protest, from mild civil disobedience to property destruction and rioting, then you can no longer claim to be a procedural liberal. My point is not that something is immoral or bad because the legislature had declared it illegal - Bryan Caplan has already destroyed that view - but that once you've thrown that out the window, you have lost all claim to the philosophy of respecting fair procedures.

Not that the left has any claim to greater respect for the rule of law or fair procedures. Former President George W. Bush certainly broke his share of laws, but President Barack Obama instructed the Justice Department not to defend a law he doesn't like. Sure, that law was a federal ban on gay marriage, but that's not the way we do things here. The correct answer to bad legislature is to change it, not break it or ignore it.

The reason we should follow written legislation is that it is a contract of rules to follow. I don't like our strict immigration laws and I want to see them relaxed, but I can't find myself getting worked up because a public school wants to only accept pupils that are legal residents, or a police agency wants to check if a suspect was violating immigration laws. The government should be bound to follow the law.

Procedural liberalism is lumped in with concepts the left claims to hold a monopoly on, like fairness and justice. They want no such things. To the left, fairness means handicapping someone who plays by the rules.

If a white male student works and studies hard, affirmative action proponents say he should have a tougher time getting into a particular college than a black student. This is being purposely unfair to individuals to attempt to create fairness in totality. They assume they have overcome the Hayekian knowledge problem and have perfect information so they can balance the scales flawlessly. In fact, they throw out the natural fairness of the world and impose a flawed attempt at artificial fairness. Neither approach is actually fair, but one incorrectly claims to be.

The same thing carries over to wealth "redistribution," limiting corporate speech, eminent domain and retroactively banning Wall Street bonuses from bailout money. People have a nasty habit of supporting the rules when it suits them, and abandoning them when they don't. The right is just as guilty of this, but it never branded itself the defender of fairness.

You can't claim to be a defender of consistent procedures and equal observation of the rules and still break the law when it helps your political goals. That is the mark of barbarism, not liberty. It's entirely possible that there are members of the left who reject law-breaking protests, inconsistent judicial actions and the handicapping of the innocent, but they have been drowned out by the rest.
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Conversations with Occupy Boston

Because the Occupy Wall Street movement is leaderless and does not fall behind a single cohesive message, nearly every conversation about it devolves into discussing what the real purpose of movement is.

So last weekend, I headed out to Boston to talk with the Occupy Boston protesters in person to see what its all about. I wanted to base my opinion on my own observations and interactions with the group.

This is not an exercise in idiot hunting; I did not search for people I could make look foolish, and I do not present any of them as official spokesmen. Everyone I talked to was friendly to me and eager to speak, even after I said what kind of blog I write. I enjoyed our conversations and I want to be as fair to them as I can.



Garrett was holding a sign listing specific financial legislation he'd like to see. "Restore Glass-Steagle, Replace the SEC, Regulate hedge funds, tax carried interest and protect our economy."

He's been following financial issues issues for five years and this was the first time he's protested since Richard Nixon's second inauguration in 1973. His plan was to display his sign for a few hours and he was there with Max, his gentle goldendoodle dog.

Garrett is very specific about what changes he wants to see for the country, as listed on his sign, and he expressed mild frustration that the Occupy Boston isn't targeting Wall Street the way the New York protests are. Instead, he said, the focus is on inequality and freedom of speech

I spotted Kevin wearing a Ron Paul shirt. He said he did not support the anti-capitalism message that's so common at the protest and supports ending the Federal Reserve, which is a libertarian message that was extremely popular with everyone at the Boston protest.

The protesters were camped a few hundred feet from the Federal Reserve bank of Boston and I wandered through the tent city and found a young man and woman with a cardboard sign about legalizing medical marijuana in Maine. They said they'd rather I talk to Victor, a young, shirtless tough-looking guy who didn't want to appear on camera.

Scrawled on his left forearm in sloppy permanent marker was the phone number for the National Lawyers Guild in case he was arrested.

Victor said the people there feel like outcasts. He said the protest has a real "community vibe" and its not controlled by any outside political groups, including liberal ones. From my own observations, I saw zero no signs supporting Obama or the Democratic party while I was there, nor did I hear anyone say much about them.

George Orwell would have loved Victor's no-nonsense honesty when I asked him what solutions he supports. With no hesitation, he said he wants to support the middle class by depopulating the Earth. In his world, rich people would be allowed to exist unless they get lazy and do nothing productive. Victor said rich people who get lazy would be "murdered."

I appreciate Victor's boldness and inability to mask his views. I asked him if he's read Orwell's "Politics and the English Language," as his clarity is exactly what Orwell endorsed, and he confessed he's not much of a reader. Despite the violence of his message, he was completely civil to me.



Mark had just arrived a few hours before as a "weekend warrior" who planned to protest until Monday's college classes. Safety-pinned to his sleeve was a red cross labeling him a protest "medic."

Mark's medical background is limited to lifeguard duty and he's there to clean pepper spray out of people's eye and help with any bumps and scrapes in case anyone tripped on the concrete.

"Capitalism is basically collapsing around us," Mark told me. The issues he cares about are the income gap and injustice. This was his first protest and he said everyone is there for scattered reasons, but the event feels like a big party.

"I think it's fair to say a lot of people here are pissed-off liberals," Mark said. He considers himself somewhat of an anarchist and wants to see the world organized with more local control. He'd rather decisions be made in the community, rather than at the state or federal level.

As I spoke with Mark, a protester named Justin came by and picked up some litter around us.

"I don't want this place to get shut down because there's trash everywhere," said Justin. He said the organizers asked for a few volunteers to help keep trash managed and he was eager to help.



At first glance Vlad seemed like a stereotypical surfer dude with a hippie drum, but his positions were nuanced and thoughtful. He's opposed to inequality between the rich and poor, greed and the way the banks are run.

However, after taking business classes he opposes the minimum wage because it will "drive jobs away." He said he was at the protest to help send a message that people are unsatisfied with the nation and the economy.

Vlad deserves a lot of credit for saying he doesn't have a firm opinion on the Federal Reserve because he doesn't know enough about the issue. It's somewhat rare to hear someone say "I don't know" or "I was wrong" in any political discussion, and I see them as a sign of thoughtful engagement, independent thinking and honesty.



Daniel had a table filled with socialist books and newspapers and he said while the movement has a lot of different viewpoints, the protest is socialist at its core. He said the reason the anti-FED view is so big is that the Federal Reserve is part of the corporate structure that controls the world.

I talked to him a bit longer than anyone else, and once again, everything was civil and courteous.

For econ nerds, when he tried repeating Marx's theory that firms with the lowest wages would be the most competitive, driving down wages, I cited Sean Masaki Flynn's book Economic for Dummies and the response that there is a finite supply of workers firms compete for by offering higher and higher compensation packages, and his only response was that there is an infinite supply of workers, which is silly.

As I was leaving, Daniel offered me a newspaper titled SocialistWorker.org from his stand. It turned out to be a Dutch treat, as after I picked it up he asked for a "suggested $1 donation." In the spirit of capitalism and free market loopholes, I paid him for his product.



This movement is like a horoscope where everyone reading it thinks it is tailored to their own experiences.

Occupy Wall Street started as routine anarchist/Marxist protest, and regular liberals have jumped on, so now the protest is a mix of anti-capitalists and Democrats. Each group thinks the movement is about their beliefs, not the others, and the Democrats get really upset when the movement is characterized as socialist.

It'd be really easy for me to take Victor and Daniel and say they are the core of this movement, but that would be dishonest. I saw a lot of average-looking young people mixed in as well, and a lot of moderate liberals support the movement from afar. However, the bomb-throwers can not be ignored



Anarchists protests do contain people who want to riot and assault police officers. They carry clubs disguised as flags and wear masks to cheat video evidence. This is not a news flash.

The National Lawyers Guild number Victor and Mark wore demonstrate organizers expected arrests, and a few days after I was there more than 100 protesters went out of their way to trespass and resist arrest. The left has this habit of trying to get arrested, then looking at the arrests as a noble sacrifice and proof that the police are thugs. That doesn't mean that police never brutalize protesters, of course, but the protesters aren't always the victims they claim to be.

If you've never heard "The people's Mic," than you have no idea how annoying it is. Try watching this Occupy Atlanta clip without skipping ahead. Speakers have to stop every few words to allow the audience to repeat them in a jumbled fashion. It's supposed to amplify the message, but it comes out like Apache Chief on an old radio. The sound rings of conformity, not solidarity.

All the classic criticisms of the Tea Party were there in Boston. It was mostly white people, there were poorly-written signs, plenty of people were angry, some protesters didn't know what they were talking about, established political activists are pushing it along and protesters started with an unfocused goal. Because there is no central leadership, anyone can idiot hunt and drag up something stupid a protester said. Critics will say that person is a typical member of the group, and supporters will say they're not.

I'm glad I went, as I feel I have a firmer grasp of why people feel so energized by this movement. I support few of the causes they care about, and even less of the solutions they support.

We really do have problems with a lack of jobs, an expensive arms race for college education, an out-of-control Federal Reserve, corporate bailouts and high health care costs. Those problems need to be addressed, but I see hands-off government policy as the solution, not expansion of Washington I heard on the streets of Boston.
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Steve Jobs wasn't in the 99%

I became aware of a strange contradiction this past week while my Facebook news feed blew up with my 20-something friends posting about the recent death of Steve Jobs and their support of Occupy Wall Street, which I've already written about more times than I expected to.

The same people that saw their lives enriched by Steve Jobs and Apple computer products are claiming that the richest 1 percent of Americans got that way by taking things away from other people. This is the mistake of assuming that acquiring wealth is a zero-sum game.

Steve Jobs got rich by helping create wealth. He made others better off by helping focus a lot of ideas from other people into useful applications. His gains carried with them gains to other people by putting iPhones and MP3 players into their hands. Why isn't he being demonized at these protests?

I don't like when someone claims to speak for me, such as these protesters declaring they represent the bottom 99 percent of Americans. I've been poor the last three years, although I made a great comeback this spring, and I still share few of the values these groups express.

In addition, by claiming they speak for nearly everyone, they're lumping in a lot of rich people. As Ezra Klein put it in an otherwise sympathetic post:

Let’s be clear. This isn’t really the 99 percent. If you’re in the 85th percentile, for instance, your household is making more than $100,000, and you’re probably doing okay. If you’re in the 95th percentile, your household is making more than $150,000.

You can't claim the richest Americans got that way only by harming people, and then turn around and praise a members of that group for enriching your life. I'm willing to grant these protesters that there are some bad things coming out of Washington, like bailouts, agricultural subsidies and the war on drugs, but that doesn't mean the wealthy are refugees from a Thomas Nash cartoon.
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Occupy Wall Street is like social media

Judging by what I'm observing on Facebook, the Occupy Wall Street movement has gained a lot of popularity with starry eyed 20-something liberals and bitter old progressives. I am now of the opinion this isn't going to just die down like the left's last attempt to replicate the Tea Party with the recent pro-union protests.

But that doesn't mean the protests will actually accomplish anything. Since they made the critical error of having no actual goals, they may be end up wasting their momentum by trying to adopt every vaguely left-wing position and spreading themselves too thin.

All that angry shouting may make the protesters feel energized, but if its not focused it won't actually accomplish anything.

As science-based marketing champion Steve Cuno has said, "Never mistake marketing-related activity for actual marketing." What we have here is social media popularity, where a lot of people may click "like" on a picture of the item your selling, but never actually buy one.
There have been a few sprawling lists of demands from the protest organizers, or people claiming to be in charge. I think the response was so much bigger than anticipated that the anti-capitalists who helped start the protests quickly lost control. Movements like the Tea Party and Earth First! function without central leadership, which makes it difficult to hash out cohesive doctrines.

The demands I have seen emerge are all over the place. There are some I agree with, like ending the war on drugs and Patriot Act, but others are so ignorant I had to check to make sure they weren't a parody. For example:

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.

Good grief. With so many unattainable, awful demands like this one, any movement that tries to establish them is doomed to failure. This is a complete divorce from economic reality. The ignorant protectionism is then curiously followed with a demand for free and open borders. This is strange, as open borders are essentially free trade for labor.

Along with other demands, the little darlings put a bow on top with the line: "These demands will create so many jobs it will be completely impossible to fill them without an open borders policy."

This is a recipe for unemployment and high prices, not prosperity.

The stupidity of these demands suggests that police have indeed been hitting the protesters in the head with billy clubs. I think if the smart liberals who are jumping on board see some of these ideas like a $20 minimum wage become central to the movement, they will either try to change them or abandon ship.

This movement can only be popular as long as it doesn't try to accomplish anything. If it never narrows down its demands, it will never accomplish anything. If it chooses moderate liberal positions, it will just be swallowed up by the Democratic party. If it chooses the radical demands being floated at this point, membership will drop and the movement will be marginalized.
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Occupy Wall Street is aimless nonsense

I don't like public protests.

It doesn't matter what the cause is, from calls for violent Marxist revolutions to the small government Tea Party rallies, there is something about public demonstrations that just turn me off.

They're loud, clumsy and mindless and they praise crude signs and annoying chants. Instead of the marketplace of ideas, protests are a monopoly of conformity. As Jean-Francois Revel said:

A human group transforms itself into a crowd when it suddenly responds to a suggestion rather than to reasoning, to an image rather than to an idea, to an affirmation rather than to proof, to the repetition of a phrase rather than to arguments, to prestige rather than to competence.

Enter Occupy Wall Street, a completely generic protest that has no real goals and is now trying to shoehorn every broad liberal talking point under a common banner. The idea of deciding what a protest is about after it's started isn't revolutionary, it's moronic.

This is the perfect example of the sad state of modern protests - self-righteous feel-good antics that have little chance of accomplishment.

If the goal is to change the world in a targeted way, than public protests are a poor investment of time and money. If instead the goal is to develop an undeserved sense of accomplishment, then by all means, paint those brown cardboard signs and repeat those slogans.
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