The View From 1776

Many commentators have argued that Occupy Wall Street (OWS) young, unemployed college graduates, burdened with large educational debts, have a point.  They followed the system and have, in effect, been defrauded by costly and ineffectual “educations.”

As many commentators also have observed, Wall Street is hardly the right focal point for their anger.  Their target should be the liberal-progressive educational system fostered in early decades of the 20th century by socialist John Dewey of the Columbia University school of education.  Liberal-progressives are the force opposed to requiring students to learn difficult academic subjects through hard work (which definitely necessitates memorization, test-taking, and performance grading). 

Diversity, self-esteem, and splinter-group identity (blacks, hispanics, feminists, homosexuals, and lesbians) have become the essence of present-day college “education.” Grade inflation and politically-correct speech-and-behavior codes have become the weapons to defraud college students, who have a right to expect that adult educators have some connection with the real world.

In that regard, Yale University historian Donald Kagan, in an article he wrote for Commentary Magazine, quotes former president of Harvard University Derek Bok:

“Many seniors graduate without being able to write well enough to satisfy their employers. Many cannot reason clearly or perform competently in analyzing complex, non-technical problems, even though faculties rank critical thinking as the primary goal of a college education. Few undergraduates receiving a degree are able to speak or read a foreign language. Most have never taken a course in quantitative reasoning or acquired the knowledge needed to be a reasonably informed citizen in a democracy. And those are only some of the problems.”

It’s hardly surprising that, through no fault of their own, the overwhelming majority of people graduating from our school systems since the 1960s are economic ignoramuses who know almost nothing about the history of the United States or the rest of the world.  When they have been schooled in the mob tactics of socialist revolutions, from sit-ins to rioting in the streets, it’s hardly surprising that the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) crowd and their Democrat/Socialist Party backers honestly believe that they have a moral right to foul private propertyand interfere with people living in the Zuccotti Park neighborhood, people working in Wall Street financial institutions, and business people operating small shops.

This op-ed piece from the Wall Street Journal deals very well with the presumed morality of OWS.

Occupying vs. Tea Partying
Freedom and the foundations of moral behavior.

By MATT KIBBE

My first instinct was to sympathize with Occupy Wall Street (OWS). At the time of the initial protests, I was in Italy giving a lecture on the tea party ethos to graduate students participating in the Istituto Bruno Leoni’s annual Mises Seminar. I was getting reports of OWS signs that I had often see at Tea Party protests, such as “End the Fed” and “Stop Crony Capitalism.” But something didn’t jibe. I wasn’t sure why.

The answer came from economist and Nobel Laureate Vernon Smith, who delivered the keynote address at the Mises Seminar. His lecture on Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments focused on the question “how do social norms emerge spontaneously?” Both Smiths, Adam and Vernon, argue that individual freedoms and property rights are the foundations of moral behavior. Individuals, with full ownership of their life, liberty and property, judge themselves and care about the positive judgments of others. This accountability allows for cooperation, connects a community and enables human prosperity.

“The most sacred laws of justice, therefore, those whose violation seems to call loudest for vengeance and punishment, are the laws which guard the life and person of our neighbor,” wrote Adam Smith back in 1759, adding that “the next are those which guard his property and possessions.” America’s tea partiers put it another way: “Don’t hurt other people and don’t take their stuff.”

From these “sacred laws” come our righteous indignation with bailouts, deficit spending and other government intrusions into our lives, such as the mandate contained in the recent U.S. health-care reform that dictates to every American what health insurance he must buy and which treatments he may or may not access. Tea partiers oppose government forcing the responsible to subsidize the irresponsibility of others, because these policies hurt other people and take their stuff.

When tea partiers petition their government for a redress of such grievances, as more than one million did on Sept. 12, 2009, they don’t get into fights, they don’t get arrested, they say “excuse me” and “thank you,” they wait in hopelessly long lines for porta-johns, they pick up their trash and leave public spaces and private property exactly as they found them. No one told myself or other tea partiers to do these things; we just believe that you shouldn’t hurt other people and you shouldn’t take their stuff.

In contrast OWS, whose ranks represent a small fraction of total tea party protestors, has struggled to maintain civility or to even identify a unifying sense of purpose in their uprising. At Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan, there is stealing, property damage and arrests often provoked by protestors wanting conflict with the police. Real people—not members of the so-called 1%—are being hurt as their small businesses are impacted and their property destroyed.

Things have gone far worse in Europe. In Rome, just one week later and 468 kilometers south of the Mises Seminar, a protest aligning itself with the OWS movement quickly devolved into a full-on riot, with the demonstrators smashing shop windows and torching cars. “Clad in black with their faces covered,” the Associated Press reported, “protesters threw rocks, bottles and incendiary devices at banks and Rome police in riot gear. Some protesters had clubs, others had hammers. They destroyed bank ATMs, set trash bins on fire and assaulted at least two news crews from Sky Italia.”

Why so much violence? Many protesters in the U.S. have legitimate anger at the crony capitalism and high unemployment that have defined the first three years of the Obama Administration. Likewise, many young people in the euro zone can’t find jobs and face a perfect storm no-growth economies, crushing sovereign debt fueled by ingrained welfare states and public unions acting as barriers to entering the job market. But for tea partiers, who rose up against many of the same circumstances, tactical non-violence simply reflects the values that first brought us together.

When you look for defining values in Occupy Wall Street, you discover only a disparate set of competing demands. Many are against capitalism per se and wealth-creation in general. They want to redistribute the pie, not grow it. But whose claims are legitimate, and how might you reallocate the wealth of some to the benefit of those more entitled? This most difficult question is playing out in real life in Zuccotti Park, where a General Assembly allocates scarce resources among factions of protesters. One demand by a group of drummers for $8,000 for new musical instruments was demonstrative. “We have worked for you! Appreciate us!” one drummer shouted angrily to the General Assembly, as reported in the Huffington Post. When the bid failed, obscenities flew and the Huffington Post reports that “a physical fight nearly erupted.”

I can’t help but think of the fate of the Twentieth Century Motor Company in Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged,” where the edict “to each according to their contribution” was replaced with “to each according to their need.” The disastrous results left an entire community—the 99%—jobless, angry and destitute.

Despite all of this, in America Occupy Wall Street has been celebrated by many in the media and the Democratic party as a legitimate counter to the tea party. All of the accusations that were wrongfully hurled at the tea party—from bigotry to violent tendencies—now seem to be occurring regularly at OWS protests. Yet they are ignored in deference to the supposed morally superiority of this new movement. Van Jones, formerly an environmental advisor to President Barack Obama, says we should ignore OWS defects because “they’ve got moral clarity.” Even Mr. Obama has said that “the protesters are giving voice to a more broad-based frustration about how our financial system works.”

Who knows, maybe cognitive dissonance is a good political strategy for the left. Can the king of crony capitalism win reelection having codified “too big to fail” into law? Can Congressional Democrats, having spent the past two years attaching Republicans to so-called “tea party extremism,” now embrace without consequence the radical demands, blatant anti-Semitism, violence and property damage of OWS?

Progressives’ burning desire to create a tea party of the left may be clouding their judgment. Even Mr. Jones has grudgingly conceded that tea partiers have out-crowd-sourced, out-organized, and out-performed the most sophisticated community organizers on the left. “Here’s the irony,” he said back in July. “They talk rugged individualist, but they act collectively.” He and his colleagues don’t seem to understand that communities can’t exist without respect for individual freedom. They can’t imagine how it is that millions of people located in disparate places with unique knowledge of their communities and circumstances can voluntarily cooperate and coordinate, creating something far greater and more valuable than any one individual could have done alone.

In the world of the contemporary Western left, someone needs to be in charge—a benevolent bureaucrat who knows better than you do. They can’t help but build hierarchical structures—a General Assembly perhaps—because they don’t understand how freedom works.

Mr. Kibbe is president of FreedomWorks, a fellow at the Austrian Economics Center in Vienna, and co-author of “Give Us Liberty: A Tea Party Manifesto” (HarperCollings, 2010)