My final word for now on this is that the furor of the Occupy Movement (and they did seem angry when they were marching toward Emily and me beating drums and chanting obscenities) is misguided. They are angry at Wall Street. I can understand this anger. The Wall Street bankers were greedy and stupid. They made silly bets that were doomed to fail (see Michael Lewis’s excellent book The Big Short or my blog post on it The Big and Short of It). They did this and when the bets went bad they went begging. The government (who should be the enforcers of things like law and discipline) flinched and, fearing a catastrophic meltdown of the world economy ran the credit card for the entire nation to bail out these bad decisions. This might have saved the economy from a meltdown (my bet is that it just made the problem bigger and that the slow train of judgment will just arrive a little later and will be moving even faster when it gets here.)
The action of the government was morally wrong. The American people should not have to pay for the bad bets (stupid, greedy, idiotic bets) of nincompoops. These brokers should not have walked away with plenty of money in their own bank accounts. They should be in jail or in a new career having all their assets stripped from them. For that matter, everyone who was making money buying investments that were stoked by the subprime boom should have lost their shirts. They did not. The government stepped in a kept the just judgment from happening.
Occupy is steamed about this. I am too.
They are steamed because they want the government to take care of them (“the little man”) now. I am steamed because I think that when economies make bad bets and do stupid things that they should bear the weight of it. It might have plunged us into a deeper recession or depression, but it could have been a step toward restoring reality to the fantasy economy that now walks upright as if it had a soul and a future (for more on this see Wendell Berry’s brilliant essay in Harpers on “Faustian Economics” ).
My gripe with Occupy then (beside the bad language) is that their tents are in the wrong place! They should be down at DC on the Mall not in lower Manhattan. If our governors in DC would have just had the courage to say no to the brokers and take the pain of reality, we would have had a reshuffling of things and would be headed, I believe, toward a brighter future. Sadly, courage and politics are not located in the same place mentally anymore. So, move the tents south about two hours and I might start listening (especially if the cursing stops).
