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| The Disturbing Agenda of Occupy Wall Street
Why the protestors are wrong to favor forced equality over liberty
A. Barton Hinkle | November 4, 2011 Reason Magazine
An excerpt:
Then there is the hatred of capitalism ("DEATH TO CAPITALISM"; "CAPITALISM DOESN'T WORK"; etc.). The alternative to a free market is, of course, an unfree one, requiring that somebody make sure people do not go around exchanging goods and services through mutual consent. How do you stop consensual activity? Take a wild guess.
All of this makes it abundantly clear that OWS prefers forced equality over liberty. Many people do. But the OWS protesters seem singularly obtuse about what this entails. As J.R. Lucas observed some years ago, equality has more than one dimension, and efforts to tame economic inequalities can produce bureaucratic empires that crystallize "an inequality of power . . . more dangerous than the inequality of wealth to which objection was originally made."
Granted, political inequality may not greatly disturb the consciences of OWS protesters, who in some locations have adopted a "revolutionary progressive stack," which "encourages women and traditionally marginalized groups [to] speak before men, especially white men." Lining up speakers by race and gender might not seem fair on an individual level. But for much of the radical left, individuals are irrelevant: The class struggle is all that matters, and the only way to end domination by one class is, apparently, to impose domination by a different one. Vladimir I. Somebody-or-other called that the dictatorship of the proletariat, if memory serves.
The OWS focus on money and economics only exposes the poverty of its quasi-Marxist critique. Equality has more than one dimension. William Niskanen, who died last week, once invited us to consider two young men: "One . . . is healthy and handsome, spends his days on the beach, has his pick of young women companions, and makes $10,000 a year. Another . . . is confined to a wheelchair, has congenital body odor, has never had an intimate relationship, and, with no other life, makes $100,000 a year as an expert computer programmer. In this case, who is worse off? Who should redistribute what to whom and how?"
The OWS "progressive stack," redistributing the right to speak, already has provided a partial answer. For a fuller one, look up Kurt Vonnegut's short story "Harrison Bergeron." It is supposed to be satire. Turns out it was prophecy.
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