Today's headlines from Occupied Territory

I have written before about the actions of the Occupy Wall Street crowd. Every day seems to bring new information about criminal activity among the "protesters". Today, a man was shot at the Occupy Vermont protest. In New York, an Emergency Medical Tech responding to a call for help was assaulted by a "protester" and had his leg broken. Things have gotten so bad in Portland Oregon that the mayor has ordered the protesters to leave their camp by Sunday. Recently we have seen all manner of people threatened; elderly women were assaulted in DC when they were doing nothing more than attending a dinner; violence has been widespread in Chicago and Minneapolis. Meanwhile, the rhetoric spewing from the protest has gotten more and more violent, anti-semitic and marxist. The Occupy group is no longer protesting about problems in the USA. They are now trying to destroy capitalism and install Marxism in its place. The sad thing is that these folks seem oblivious to the fact that Marxist economics was tried for seventy years in the Soviet Union with the result of widespread poverty and the collapse of the Soviet state. Marxist regimes in Eastern Europe were pushed out finally with the Soviet collapse twenty-one years ago and it has taken decades for the economies in this area to come back to a point even close to the West. Capitalism is the force that created all the wealth in the USA. Destroying capitalism will not bring equality except to the extent that everyone will be poor and everyone will be miserable. Perhaps the best way to look at it is this: in a capitalist system, the goal is to create wealth and reward those who work. Once such a system is successful, the benefits of the wealth creation are widespread. Nevertheless, there are inevitable differences between those who work hard and are successful and those who are not. In a Marxist system of the type promoted by the Occupy crowd, there is more uniformity in wealth among the population. the poperty of the wealthy is taken from them. The same happens to the middle class. In the end everyone is poor, but they are equal. Of course, there are the government officials, the apparatchiks, who somehow manage to use the resources of the state to bring prosperity to themselves and their families, but this is a tiny group. The question is whether we want a prosperous society without total economic uniformity (capitalism) or a poor society where nearly all are equal but all are poor (Marxism)?

The only rational answer is capitalism.