Any method of allocating resources other than the free market price system ultimately leads to tyranny. Yet the Occupy Wall Street Non-Leaders, presumably opposed to tyranny, have said many times that they want a “democratic economy”. There simply is no such thing. It’s impossible.
The only alternative to prices is force: either political force, business leverage (big business/unions or political cronies/monopolies), or violence. In those environments the winners are not those with the best ideas, the best products, or the most willingness to work hard, but the elites and their cronies who allocate to their friends. It is ALWAYS like this.
The French, Russian, German, Chinese, and other revolutions all bear witness to the fact that without free market prices, power takes over. And these revolutions always start with the idealists who create a vacuum of doubt and inaction, opening the door for the thugs. Ask the secularist democrats who started the Egyptian revolution and are now being pushed aside by the Islamist thugs.
In our own country people say, “Oh, that’s not the ‘real’ OWS people doing that stuff, it’s anarchists who have infiltrated their ranks.” Of course. Always. What does anyone expect? And so that’s why the laws must be enforced, and everyone’s rights must be respected, from those who want to quietly protest to those who want to use their city’s sidewalks and parks. Otherwise there is anarchy, which always leads to more violence and exploitation of the weakest, not less.
HOWEVER, although all of the above mentioned revolutions were triggered by the anarchy created in the years and months leading up to them, they were ultimately caused by the previous establishment either ignoring social justice, or actively working against it. The Court of the French King, the Czar’s bureaucrats, Arab dictators and all the others created an environment in which the common people believed that they had no stake in their country’s future. And so the idealists’ dreams/lies gained traction that otherwise would have been impossible.
And in their last days, all of the prior regimes were paralyzed by inaction and corruption. Lenin and Trotsky were the most surprised of anyone that they could seize power so easily and start assassinating people—all of the “good” people had abandoned the middle ground of compromise for their own self-interests, and so no reasonable change was possible. Enter the killers. Russia got 70 years of crushing violence and tyranny.
It is up to us—I use that term to mean anyone with education, common sense and good will—to implement reasonable change. We MUST come together and enact the Great Compromise to end our debt burden, rein in impossible entitlements, and increase tax revenue by simplifying the tax code while eliminating all loopholes, both personal and business (not raising rates).
Let’s truly level the playing field for everyone, with no government/business special deals.
That’s as close to economic democracy as we can hope for.
Besides the incredible benefits in their own right from doing these things, such reasonable compromises/actions will defuse the traction of those who would rush us over the cliff to an impossible “democratic economy” of despair.
I see the Tea Party as a part of this equation, but certainly not the only part. One of our sons has pointed out how gerrymandered “safe” Congressional districts lead to the election of extremists on both sides, not compromisers. So we get gridlock.
There is a lot to be done, and I thought for about a week last summer that President Obama was going to lead us to the Great Compromise, but then he seized defeat from that potential victory under pressure from his left. It is up to us, all of us, to stay engaged and to push for that Compromise, with the current batch of elected officials, or the next.
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