Civil War Between Occupy Wall Street Protesters and Tea Partiers?
I worry that the Occupy Wall Street protests veer closer to violence every day. The press reports suggest a fundamental clash between left and right, with lefties among the OWS protesters and Tea Partiers on the right.
Thomas Sowell had it right, decades ago, in his book, A Conflict of Visions, when he showed how conservatives and modern liberals are rendered deaf to each other's views by their fundamentally irreconcilable opinions on the nature of humanity and the universe itself. This difference of opinion poisons their attempts to talk with each other about any matters of political policy. The left and right talk past each other without hearing the essence of the things which worry them. The rhetoric becomes increasingly hostile now, in our day of Tea Partiers and would-be Occupiers of Wall Street.
One of the websites I follow is Agora Financial's. They are a source of much wise advice about investments in a crazy world. They create many products, including films (such as "I.O.U.S.A") books (Empire of Debt), and, to the point here, e-letters by Bill Bonner and Addison Wiggin: The Daily Reckoning, and The 5 Minute Forecast, with commentary on culture and the economy of the world.
This week a reader's letter to the editor of The 5 Minute Forecast spoke of his fear that a civil war may be coming between liberals and conservatives. If a civil war does break out, he thought the conservatives would win because "they have all the guns." I disagree.
A civil war would be ruinous to all of us. Moreover, I doubt that the outcome would be determined by the fact that conservatives are armed. Gun-toting conservatives have neither "all the guns" nor the biggest guns.
Remember, the gun-control advocates on the left have their very own man in the White House, and he, say many conservatives, is the "Commie-in-Chief" of the military! The military's fire power dwarfs any small arms in the hands of Tea Partiers.
When our president barks orders, our military is duty-bound to march forward, equipped with all of modern warfare's frightful arms of mass murder.
But sheer fire power is not decisive in itself. In the west we possess overwhelming firepower, but we are so addled that we lack the moral confidence even to name our poorly armed enemies in any terms but politically correct euphemisms, much less to mount any effective effort that might actually cut off the head of this snake. Looking at our terrorist enemies in the world, we dare not quote the countless pages of the Quran that inspire terrorists to kill us. (We are mostly just as blind to those many pages of the Bible which once provided Christians with all the moral authority they needed to go spill oceans of blood in the name of God.)
On the domestic scene, we are so addled that we are unable to name the active ingredients that have brought about the economic chaos that so riles the Occupy Wall Street protesters.
And what might these active ingredients be?
My usual suspects for all the craziness in the world are these:
1.) The tension between crazy contradictory religions, each claiming to have the absolute word of God on their side;
2.) Crazy postmodern philosophy, which denies the possibility of our having any confidence that our knowledge of anything can be objective, and that, indeed, all "knowledge" amounts to nothing more than social conventions agreed upon by the tribe into which one is born;
3.) Ignorance of any sound economics (indeed, to the contrary, the most powerful political cells of the chattering class are barking mad, infected by that intellectual virus which is the economics of John Maynard Keynes);
4.) Greed that finds its wings through the unholy marriage of big business and big government, which is another description of "crony-capitalism," and is not to be confused with any actual, unhampered markets, or real economic freedom.
But, in my humble opinion, the "proximate cause" (as the NTSB describes the last thing that causes an airplane to crash) of so much of this economic misery, is ... the Fed, and of course all the things that gave us the Federal Reserve System in the first place, and endowed it with so much power to wreak havoc in the world.
In my opinion, it is central banking and the evil machinations of our Federal Reserve System which has infused the economy with all the phony money needed to pump up one damned economic bubble after another ... and the underhanded political chicanery that is both cause and beneficiary of this process.
But the Wall Street protesters have another idea of what is causing their misery.
So what are the protesters themselves saying? What is it that has fanned these flames of protest?
At the website of OccupyWallSt.org, it says that the protests are the complaints of the 99% of the population against the rich and powerful 1% who run the world by using the political machinery, the banks, and the "unaccountable multi-national corporations" for their own predatory benefit.
Wall Street appears to be the symbol of the system the protesters revile and want to bring down.
"The solution is World Revolution," says a banner on the home page of the OWS website. The "About Us" link says, "The movement is inspired by popular uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia, and aims to expose how the richest 1% of people are writing the rules of an unfair global economy that is foreclosing on our future."
Given that this "Arab Spring" looks like it is delivering Egypt into the hands of the Muslim Brotherhood, parent organization of Al Qaeda and other delightful champions of peace, I worry about any group that finds inspiration in those Arab uprisings.
A college professor's demographic survey this week reveals that roughly 2/3 of the OWS group consists of political Independents, 1/3 are Democrats, and less than 2% are Republicans. Almost all of the group surveyed has at least some college, 1/5 of the protesters have post graduate degrees. This is an educated group with its political center of gravity well left of center, and, to my ear, their complaints sound like the anti-capitalist rhetoric I hear among environmentalists.
It's interesting that "Wall Street" is the symbol of the protests. I think this captures the nature of many complaints I hear about the world. In the movie, "Wall Street," naked greed is the villain, and this predatory grasping is embodied by the mere "paper pushing" which is depicted as the sole activity of Wall Street, and which is depicted as having no economic benefit to the world. This view of Wall Street is a caricature purveyed by the ignorant, and would be laughable, if it weren't such a politically powerful meme in the real world and believed to be true by so many economic naifs.
So what does Wall Street really do? The crucial activity of financial markets is to direct the flow of capital into those ventures that attempt to satisfy the most urgent demands of consumers. To bring down "Wall Street" would be equivalent to opening a vein and letting the blood drain out of a person. But it takes a little knowledge of sound economics to understand a higher abstraction such as the idea of capital to fund new ventures.
Now, how would anybody come to have a clue about the nature of sound economics, when the mainstream of economics has been taken over by the Patron Saint of Central Banking, John Maynard Keynes, and his latter-day acolytes, such as Paul Krugman?
Keynes was a privileged graduate of Cambridge who cherished the goals of the Fabian socialists, that turn-of-the 20th century English group which championed the ideas of Marx, but advocated the institution of these ideas not by violent revolution, like the Bolsheviks, but by gradual takeover of such institutions as the schools and the monetary system.
Krugman, of course is the celebrated New York Times columnist, an MIT PhD in economics, Princeton professor, Nobel Prize winner, and a man who continues to purvey such asinine fallacies as the notion that the destruction of the World Trade Center was good for the economy because it "stimulates" consumer spending. (For why this notion is so completely idiotic, see Henry Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson, for his summary of Frederic Bastiat's brilliant little essay, "On What is Seen and Unseen.")
Take control of a country's currency, Keynes understood very well, and you have the means to steal the value of all the citizens' money and thereby to take over the whole economic system, just as Marx envisioned.
Moreover, this theft of the citizens' money is done by the central bankers in a way that almost no one will begin to understand.
The citizens will know only that their economic situation is bad, and they will blame capitalism and cry out for ever more control of the greedy capitalists by the wise public servants at the helm of government.
Hmm ... sounds just like the Occupy Wall Street protesters.
What else can they mean when they call for "democratic" takeover of the greedy 1% by the hapless 99%?
Now, it seems clear that the occupiers of Wall Street are lefties protesting capitalism. So this is essentially the usual conflict of visions between liberals and conservatives. You may argue, and I would agree, that left and right offer logically false alternatives that do not exhaust all the political possibilities (which would have to include at least the addition of libertarian and objectivist opinions.) But we are nevertheless looking at the Wall Street protests as a more or less conventional, if heightened, conflict between liberals and conservatives.
So what happens if, as I fear, these protests turn violent? Already the New York City police have bashed a few heads of protesters into the fenders of automobiles (as they did on the day the protesters crossed the Brooklyn Bridge.) Around the country there are reports of protesters defecating on police cars and utterly trashing parks where they sleep.
There is another factor to think about, if there should ever be another conflict between conservatives and liberals that is violent enough to warrant calling out the Army (which happened during the New York City draft riots of 1864, the murders of civil rights marchers at Selma in 1964, the hippie era students shot by the National Guard at Kent State University, and with the riots and destruction at the Democratic National Convention of 1968, among countless other examples.) This other factor to consider is that our military tends to be strongly conservative.
Remember that duty does not require soldiers merely to jump when ordered to jump, but to obey orders mindfully and with conscience. Duty compels soldiers to disobey an immoral order.
I mentioned earler that the military tends to be strongly conservative. If the Army is called out and ordered to shoot American civilians, at some point we can expect that the military's conservative conscience may step in, perhaps with the ugly memory of such episodes as Lt. Callie's behavior at My Lai, during the Vietnam War.
It may happen that our soldiers will disobey orders to shoot American citizens of the Tea Party whose only "crime" lies in calling for the government to respect the core American principle that all individuals are endowed by their nature with the right to their own life, liberty, and property. Perhaps I give the military's conscience too much credit. (As a Vietnam-era veteran myself, I am allowed to say this.)
Yet another factor to think about here is that any conservative war of Resistance against politically entrenched lefties would surely be a type of guerrilla war, against which standing armies have a poor record.
And what about a leftie war of resistance against a newly ascendant conservative government? Hard to imagine, given that the gun control advocates on the left have already turned in their grandparents' guns.
How about secession?
What else was the American revolution, but secession? Americans widely debated secession shortly after the revolution. Lincoln's assertion, a few decades later, that "a house divided cannot stand" makes a nice bumper sticker slogan, but it is purely metaphorical and makes no real argument for the nature and structure of a good social order. Lincoln's justification for the Civil War was the preservation of the Union, and this idea is out of step with the ideas which animated the American Revolution, where the only moral justification for establishing a government was as an instrument for the protection of every individual's right to life, liberty, and property. (Well ... there was Alexander Hamilton's big government vision for the new republic, and some other significant contradictions built into the system, but I think most would agree with what I just said about the essence of the ideas which animated the American founders, namely, individual rights.)
Notwithstanding our Civil War, the idea of secession has more recently been floated from New Hampshire to Texas. Our American founders believed that when in the course of human events things get too damned awful, people have the human right to revolt and secede from corrupt governments.
Maybe Texas will secede, in the end, which might light a beacon to attract many of those disaffected Americans who are unhappy with America's morphing into a European style socialist order--a direction in which the US has been sliding since at least the late 19th century, a time when generations of American students went to Germany for a university education and came home in a raging fever of enthusiasm for collectivist and Kantian idealism. Politically, this generation of Americans came home enamored of Chancellor Bismarck's welfare state and public schools, and they became our first generation of American progressives, such as John Dewey and Woodrow Wilson.
Moreover, it is largely the great grandchildren of those progressives, the new
so-called progressives who are showing up as the would-be occupiers of Wall Street.
So ... I continue to worry that the Wall Street protests will turn violent, and the solution will be even worse than the condition in which we already find ourselves.
Ending on a happier note, one that offers some explanatory power for what is going on in the world today, have a look at Murray Rothbard's books on Keynes, the Man, and, America's Great Depression.
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revised 2012.0810,
and again, slightly, in the paragraph on how economic naifs believe that Wall Street engages merely in meaningless "paper pushing."
2015.1123.
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