{"id":1960,"date":"2011-10-11T17:27:34","date_gmt":"2011-10-11T17:27:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/victorhanson.com.108-166-28-151.mdgnetworks.com\/wordpress\/?p=1960"},"modified":"2013-03-13T17:30:39","modified_gmt":"2013-03-13T17:30:39","slug":"wall-streets-disgruntles-utopians","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wall-streets-disgruntles-utopians\/","title":{"rendered":"Wall Street’s Disgruntles Utopians"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Bruce S. Thornton<\/p>\n

FrontPage Magazine<\/em><\/p>\n

The Occupy Wall Street protesters are looking more and more like the shock troops of the Democratic Party\u2019s electoral tactic of class warfare. Responding to a question about the protesters, the President gave an oblique endorsement when he said, \u201cThe American people understand that not everybody has been following the rules; that Wall Street is an example of that.\u201d That would be the same rule-bending Wall Street from which his 2008 campaign received more money than any other politician in history. Forgetting that largess as he demonizes the rich, the President now wants a 5.6% surtax on millionaires, which would include not just Wall Street fat cats, but small businesses on Main Street. Certainly organized labor also thinks they can use the protesters, which is why some labor groups \u2014 particularly public employee unions hooked up to diminishing taxpayer-funded life support \u2014 are marching alongside them, in the hopes that they can exploit this movement to protect their Cadillac benefits.<\/p>\n

The protesters themselves comprise the usual suspects: badly educated young people (\u201cStudents loans=indentured servitude,\u201d read one sign), aging hippies, leftover leftists (\u201cMarx Was Right,\u201d read another), and the purveyors of various wacky conspiracy theories, like the guy whose sign links the Federal Reserve to the pyramid on the dollar bill. This m\u00e9lange explains the profound ignorance of economic reality that lies behind the protesters\u2019 complaints about the \u201cgreed and corruption of the 1%.\u201d In this melodrama, \u201cWall Street\u201d and \u201ccorporations\u201d have rigged the system so that they enrich themselves at the expense of everybody else. \u201cGrowing income inequality\u201d is the proof of this nefarious behavior, as the left-wing magazine\u00a0Mother Jones<\/a><\/em>\u00a0reports: \u201cA huge share of the nation\u2019s economic growth over the past 30 years has gone to the top one-hundredth of one percent, who now make an average of $27 million per household. The average income for the bottom 90 percent of us? $31,244.\u201d QED.<\/p>\n

What\u00a0Mother Jones<\/em>\u00a0leaves out, of course, is some facts I\u2019ve brought up\u00a0before<\/a>about the same period. In 1981, the top 1% paid 17.58% of all federal income taxes; in 2005, this same cohort paid 39.38%. In 1981 the top 1% paid $94.84 billion (in 2005 dollars); in 2005 they paid $368.13, an increase of 288%. In the most progressive tax system among OECD economies, today the top 10% of American taxpayers pay 70% of all revenues, while the bottom 47% pay nothing. In other words, this increasing \u201cincome inequality\u201d has led to the rich footing most of the tax bill for all the goodies the federal government dispenses. Contrary to the current class-warfare rhetoric, \u201cIf you want to get more tax revenues from the rich,\u201d economist\u00a0Arthur Laffer<\/a>\u00a0points out, \u201cyou\u2019ve got to make the rich richer, and to make the rich richer, you\u2019ve got to lower tax rates.\u201d If the \u201canarchists for Big Government,\u201d as Mark Steyn calls them, really want more federal money for their demands like \u201cfree college education,\u201d \u201ca $20 minimum wage,\u201d and a trillion dollars for \u201cecological restoration,\u201d they should be endorsing supply-side economics.<\/p>\n

But the Wall Street Occupiers and their sympathizers in the Democratic Party can\u2019t seem to grasp these wealth-creating powers of a free-market economy. They\u2019re stuck in a pre-modern notion of wealth as something limited, like land or gold, so that if someone has more, someone else must have less. But two centuries of capitalism have demonstrated that wealth can be continually created and thus distributed to more and more people, which accounts for the astonishing rise in living standards of the past two hundred years. What is historically miraculous is not the volume of wealth the top 1% possesses, but the amount enjoyed by everybody else.<\/p>\n

A consequence of this success is that the one in seven Americans the government categorizes as poor in the United States enjoys nutrition, leisure, entertainment, and healthcare superior to those available to the king of Spain in the 16th century. As The Heritage Foundation\u2019s Robert Rector and Rachel Sheffield\u00a0write<\/a>, \u201cIn 2005, the typical household defined as poor by the government had a car and air conditioning. For entertainment, the household had two color televisions, cable or satellite TV, a DVD player, and a VCR. If there were children, especially boys, in the home, the family had a game system, such as an Xbox or a PlayStation. In the kitchen, the household had a refrigerator, an oven and stove, and a microwave. Other household conveniences included a clothes washer, clothes dryer, ceiling fans, a cordless phone, and a coffee maker.\u201d Indeed, so successful has capitalism been at raising living standards that obesity, once a sign of wealth, is now a disease of the poor. And let\u2019s not forget that the protesters themselves have the leisure to protest and the cell-phones to record their antics only because capitalism has created the surplus wealth that has freed them from backbreaking drudgery and abject poverty.<\/p>\n

The supposed malign effects of \u201cincome inequality\u201d on well-being, then, aren\u2019t really the issue for the left. The faux-populist rhetoric of income inequality is the camouflage for the true goal. As one protester instructed another: \u201cIt\u2019s about taking down systems, it doesn\u2019t matter what you\u2019re protesting.\u201d Capitalism must go in order to redistribute wealth as a means for advancing ideological preferences and goals, and achieving the radical egalitarianism that the left considers to be \u201csocial justice\u201d \u2014 the same old socialist dream that littered the 20th century with corpses, and whose milder yet still pernicious forms have brought several European countries to the brink of insolvency. In the end, what the protesters are really angry about is that the world of reality does not live up to the world of their utopian dreams.<\/p>\n

\n

\u00a92011 Bruce S. Thornton<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Bruce S. Thornton FrontPage Magazine The Occupy Wall Street protesters are looking more and more like the shock troops of the Democratic Party\u2019s electoral tactic of class warfare. Responding to a question about the protesters, the President gave an oblique endorsement when he said, \u201cThe American people understand that not everybody has been following […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[22,11,47],"tags":[343,417,570,1044,288,338,83,242,592],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-vC","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1661,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/blame-our-failing-schools-for-occupy-wall-street\/","url_meta":{"origin":1960,"position":0},"title":"Blame Our Failing Schools for Occupy Wall Street","author":"victorhanson","date":"November 2, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton FrontPage Magazine Having taught in a state university for thirty years, I\u2019m not surprised by the ignorance on display among the Occupy Wall Street protestors. From kindergarten to university, for decades our schools have abandoned the teaching of basic facts and foundational thinking skills, and replaced\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Education"","block_context":{"text":"Education","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/education\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":772,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-stupid-party\/","url_meta":{"origin":1960,"position":1},"title":"The Stupid Party","author":"victorhanson","date":"May 20, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thronton FrontPage Magazine The presidency of Barack Obama has established once and for all that modern liberalism is now the stupid party. 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The Brett Kavanaugh opening hearing turned into a progressive circus, with shouting would-be Democratic presidential candidates vying with screaming protesters to see who could be the most obnoxious. Ossified senior\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Donald Trump"","block_context":{"text":"Donald Trump","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/donald-trump\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1298,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/two-bad-september-days\/","url_meta":{"origin":1960,"position":3},"title":"Two Bad September Days","author":"victorhanson","date":"December 27, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services Two terrible September days sum up the first decade of the new American millennium. The first, of course, was Sept. 11, 2001. Osama bin Laden\u2019s suicide terrorists that morning hit the Pentagon, knocked down the World Trade Center, killed 3,000 Americans, and left\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "9\/11"","block_context":{"text":"9\/11","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/war\/911\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1654,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/occupy-what\/","url_meta":{"origin":1960,"position":4},"title":"Occupy What?","author":"victorhanson","date":"November 6, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson PJ Media Playing With Fire Occupy Wall Street follows three years of sloppy presidential name-calling \u2014 \u201cmillionaires and billionaires,\u201d slurs about Las Vegas and the Super Bowl, profit-mad, limb-lopping doctors, introspection that\u00a0now is not the time for profits\u00a0[1] and at some point we should cease making\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Political Culture"","block_context":{"text":"Political Culture","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/american-culture\/political-culture\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":9028,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/hillary-and-the-suspension-of-disbelief\/","url_meta":{"origin":1960,"position":5},"title":"Hillary and the Suspension of Disbelief","author":"victorhanson","date":"February 9, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"By Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ Works and Days by PJMedia In a September 2007 congressional inquiry about the ongoing surge in Iraq, then Senator Hillary Clinton all but called Gen. David Petraeus a liar. After Petraeus gave a cautiously optimistic\u2014and prescient\u2014appraisal of the growing quiet in Iraq, Clinton curtly dismissed\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Campaign 2016"","block_context":{"text":"Campaign 2016","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/campaign-2016\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"hillary_stunned","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/02\/hillary_stunned.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1960"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1960"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1960\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1962,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1960\/revisions\/1962"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1960"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1960"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1960"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}