Occupy what?

I have been trying to understand and follow the “Occupy Wall Street”  protests of the last three-plus weeks (and its various stepchildren around the country) and I have yet to figure exactly what point the protesters are trying to make.

That corporations are “bad” … all a corporation is is a voluntary – yes, I said voluntary – legal construct to allow people to unite for some purpose while limiting their liability. This limited liability is part of the reason for the success of the modern world because those who voluntarily invest in any corporation, of whatever size, shape or purpose, are only liable to the extent they are invested in the corporation. That actually serves a good economic purpose, rather than bad … in my humble estimation.

If you eliminate the corporations, then what are you left with? I am not sure anyone has an answer to that or at least I am not hearing any.

Ok, so five percent of the nation controls most of the nation’s wealth … since when is that news. It always has been that way, and besides, most of that wealth these days is on paper and is not real “wealth” … however you want to define that.

So the people who manage corporations are “greedy” … so what? First of all, I wish someone would give me a practical working definition of what greedy means, because I am not sure what it means.

Are we saying that individuals can’t own their own labor and profit from it or leverage it to their advantage? That they are not allowed to exchange the fruits of their own talents and labors for whatever the market will bear? If that is your viewpoint, then you have seriously missed out on the historical lessons of the last three centuries. By granting the individual the right to own their own labors (and the results of that labor) and to exchange it is the reason why millions –if not billions - of people are not living at subsistence levels, particularly in the US,

The biggest problem I have with the devotees of the concept that society/government  owes individuals the satisfaction of their “needs” is that nobody ever gets around to defining exactly what satisfying those “needs” means. At what point do needs become merely desires or even luxuries?

If you mean survival, then a shirt, coat, pants, socks, shoes, a puptent, a blanket, a portapottie (1 for every hundred people or so) and maybe 2,000 calories a day should do the trick … anything more than that and you are getting into discriminatory choices that differentiate individuals and then we are not treating people equal.

Oh, that is the point. We all are supposed to be equal … but in what way? We should be equal before the law (the law should be blind to our differences and our treatment therefore should be equal) … But that doesn’t happen because we happen to be individuals, different and unique, and discriminatory by nature.

Equal outcomes (incomes, etc.) are about as fallacious as anything that can be proposed. If you are not happy where you are, then change something … usually starting with yourself.

Anyway, so much for my ramblings.