Respectfully Submitted by Lawrence Rafferty-Guest Blogger
After the news over the past few months about the global uprisings against tyrannical and non-responsive governments, I have pondered why the United States has not had more people in the street protesting the economic inequality that we are facing here at home?
We have seen uprisings in Egypt, Libya, Spain, Greece and many more places, but at best we have seen large numbers in Wisconsin and Ohio protesting about State governments trying to remove collective bargaining rights away from state employees. One group of dedicated and non-violent protesters is especially interesting to me since they have taken to the streets and they have stayed there to press their fight. It is a group in Spain called the Indignados. They are camped out in various areas of Spain in an attempt to draw the country’s and the world’s attention to what they see as the Spanish government’s attempts to cater to the bankers and not to Main Street.
“Thursday night Madrid’s city centre offered a glimpse of what Western democracies have become, as thousands of unarmed nonviolent civilians with their hands up in the air shouting “these are our weapons” and “this is a dictatorship” were beaten by police commandos in full riot gear. This event was the culmination of a month of intense mobilizations across the country by the popular movement known as the ‘Indignados’. People, whom despite being ignored by the government have made their voices heard, as banking cartels, European bureaucrats, rating agencies and the country’s elites continue in their frantic push to sell-off Spain’s remaining public wealth, and persist in the implementation of drastic cuts to the welfare state. The ‘Indignados’ are fully aware of the fact that their government does not represent them, whenever they congregate they shout that loud and clear. They know that only popular unity will salvage them from the train wreck, which complicit speculators and politicians have created, and as they read the financial news, they know things can only get worse. When the EU announced today that the economic crisis is no longer restricted to the Euro-zone periphery countries, people in the movement understood that this could only mean bad news for them.” Truthout
Now, we have had some Tea Party protests, but their numbers were paltry in comparison to the Spanish protests. The numbers in Wisconsin and Ohio were the closest to the Spain numbers, but those protesters were not met with wide-spread beatings at the hands of the government and police and they are still not camping out in Madison and Columbus as they are in Madrid.
Would protestors in the United States ever commit to a continuing protest for months in Washington, D.C.? These Indignados in Spain, are continuing to protest what they see as government attempts to balance their budgets on the backs of the poor and the middle class. Why haven’t we seen tent cities springing up in Washington, D.C. and in state capitals across the country? Many progressives and liberals have claimed that Washington is working only for the bankers and Wall Street barons, so why aren’t our streets filled with dedicated people who are willing to nonviolently protest against the Rich getting richer, while the middle class and poor seem to get poorer? Is the claim of rising inequality between the rich and poor true?
Where is the evidence that the income disparity is growing in the United States? … “in dollar terms, the rich are still getting richer, and the poor are falling further behind them. The income gap between the richest and poorest Americans grew last year to its largest margin ever, a stark divide as Democrats and Republicans spar over whether to extend Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthy. The top-earning 20 percent of Americans – those making more than $100,000 each year – received 49.4 percent of all income generated in the U.S., compared with the 3.4 percent made by the bottom 20 percent of earners, those who fell below the poverty line, according to the new figures. That ratio of 14.5-to-1 was an increase from 13.6 in 2008 and nearly double a low of 7.69 in 1968.At the top, the wealthiest 5 percent of Americans, who earn more than $180,000, added slightly to their annual incomes last year, the data show. Families at the $50,000 median level slipped lower.” Huffington Post
With those depressing numbers, why haven’t American “Indignados” taken over Washington, D.C. like their Spanish counterparts did in Madrid? Are Americans just too lazy or indifferent to their plight? Have they given up being able to make a real difference in Washington? Why aren’t you and I there in Washington pressing our claims for economic equality? Finally, what will it take for the American poor and jobless to stand up and say, enough is enough? Maybe you have the answer for these American Indignados!
Submitted by Lawrence Rafferty-Guest Blogger
Gene, Bob, KD
Democracy. Legal fiction. Accept it. Move on.
“The Constitution has no inherent authority or obligation. It has no authority or obligation at all, unless as a contract between man and man. And it does not so much as even purport to be a contract between persons now existing. It purports, at most, to be only a contract between persons living eighty years ago. [This essay was written in 1869.] And it can be supposed to have been a contract then only between persons who had already come to years of discretion, so as to be competent to make reasonable and obligatory contracts. Furthermore, we know, historically, that only a small portion even of the people then existing were consulted on the subject, or asked, or permitted to express either their consent or dissent in any formal manner. Those persons, if any, who did give their consent formally, are all dead now. Most of them have been dead forty, fifty, sixty, or seventy years. and the constitution, so far as it was their contract, died with them. They had no natural power or right to make it obligatory upon their children. It is not only plainly impossible, in the nature of things, that they could bind their posterity, but they did not even attempt to bind them. That is to say, the instrument does not purport to be an agreement between any body but “the people” THEN existing; nor does it, either expressly or impliedly, assert any right, ”
http://jim.com/treason.htm
ekeyra,
I can’t say I disagree with you. I read your link last night to those FDA SWAT team incidents in the past 25 years and it made my skin crawl. Administrative agents that act abusively should be punished severely; if only for the fact that they carry out their crimes under the color of law.
Nonetheless, while I’m a complete novice when it comes to economics, I can ascertain that this fairy tale of a completely free market simply does not and cannot exist in a civilized society.
And your observation that the public sector is rife with incompetence is duly noted. I firmly believe in the idea of the government offering ‘comfortable’ salaries and huge tax breaks to lure in competent workers who prefer to follow their conscience in lieu of selling out.
@Bob, Esq,
I understand your point, but your faith in the efficacy of regulations that would mitigate or have prevented this problem is perhaps misplaced:
The market disciplined Ford (and forced a voluntary recall), not the regulations or the regulatory body in charge of enforcing those regulations.
Or perhaps you’d care to justify dismissing the fundamental tenet of the form of democracy as a legal fiction in defense of the actual legal fiction of a corporation.
No, kderosa. The ball has been in your court since you started your campaign of spurious allegations as a tool of disruption. Play it or run home with it.
@ GeneH
Escalate and I will. Ball’s in your court.
“Perhaps i was too loose with my “homework” euphamism. What I specifically meant was: Dont just take someone’s word for it, find out for yourself. If ralph nader figured it out, what was keeping anyone else from finding out?”
1. A man’s got to know his limitations. No one is an expert in everything.
2. Accordingly, It’s my life and I refuse to sacrifice my time to exercising any sort of due diligence that can’t be handled by routine government regulation ensuring a fair bargain.
3. A government’s got to know its limitations. When government regulation becomes the exercise of power beyond right that no one has a right to, i.e. tyranny, then it’s time to change the government.
Bob,
Your casino security analogy would again be applicable, if it werent for a few niggling details. You have no way of knowing if the bouncers or pit bosses even know or understand the rules of the game they are supposedly presiding over. In a casino its a safe assumption because if they dont and start tossing out honest paying customers, they wont be there very long. In a regulatory bureaucracy, with no economic incentive to make correct decisions, there is no way of knowing if the people calling the shots have any idea what they are doing.
I defer you to my post where a woman making homemade organic ice cream was politely suggested to irradiate her food before serving it to her customers to continue operating without a liscence that, supposedly, confered information to her customers about its relative safety. Do you see the insanity in that? To make sure she wouldnt harm anyone with her unliscenced food, regulators told her to irradiate it and they would look the other way.
“If markets were as perfect as textbook microeconomics says they are, there would indeed be no need for caveat emptor. Competition would guarantee prices at their lowest-possible level and product quality at its highest. But real-world markets aren’t like that. People aren’t perfectly informed, and communicating information is costly.
So isn’t this a good reason for government regulation? In the case of less-than-perfect competition, shouldn’t people in government protect consumers (and sellers for that matter) from opportunistic traders? Indeed, isn’t that why we have the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, and a host of other regulatory bureaucracies that Congress is constantly legislating into existence? Well, there are problems with that popular argument.
The first problem is that, as Public Choice economics and Austrian political economy (pdf) teaches us, people in the public sector are at least as self-interested and uninformed about the things that matter as people in the private sector. However, at least buyers and sellers in the private sector have a material interest in accurately forecasting benefits and costs and in keeping a check on one another; in the public sector that incentive is effectively absent. So if private-sector competition works imperfectly because of those human failings, it’s not likely to work any better – probably much worse — with the flawed and unmotivated humans in the public sector.”
http://www.thefreemanonline.org/headline/why-caveat-emptor/
kderosa,
Bring it then. Quit your whining and make the complaint.
kderosa,
A tool (such as C/B analysis) is only as good in application as the skill and the intent of the user. Proper application in a business sense of the analysis is skewed out of the gate by an amoral prejudiced and desired outcome, the profit motive (a weak form of outcome determinism). Proper application in government does not have that prejudicial factor as government does not have to operate at profit. Cost can be compared to benefit on a break-even or even a net loss basis and still be found to be a worthwhile investment.
Kderosa: “we have laws against fraud that have come up from the common law. In fact, I’d suggest that most of what we need to regulate commerce is already providing in contract and tort law”
So you’d rather fight through 3-5 years of litigation just to make the case that you’d been had?
And in what world would there be such a mammoth court system to handle all those complaints?
Explain why I should devote so much time out of my life to simply ensure I get what I pay for?
Regulations are my insurance against having the life sucked out of me in litigation.
Surely the pragmatist in you must see this.
@GeneH
Go ahead and escalate the personal attacks to the point where I think it is appropriate to bring them to JT’s attention and I will surely take you up on that challenge. Bring on that Buddha charm.
“Your assertion that “We the People” is a legal fiction is prime facie ridiculous and deserves ridicule. ”
We shall see later today how ridiculous that assertion really is.
Bob,
“So why should I now assume the aforesaid liar provide me with sufficient or correct information to do my homework?”
Perhaps i was too loose with my “homework” euphamism. What I specifically meant was: Dont just take someone’s word for it, find out for yourself. If ralph nader figured it out, what was keeping anyone else from finding out?
@Bob,
As I said, Ford was wrong and they were punished severely under tort law. What more can be done than to perhaps seek criminal charges against the directors which may have been done?
Ford made a cost/benefit analysis (does this sounds familiar, Gene) of the defect and the cost of the recall to fix the defect and gambled that it would be cheaper to pay the damages. They calculated wrong.
ekeyra,
Try seeing regulations as the pit boss and the burly security guys looking to break your thumbs if you get out of line.
Bob,
Nice.
kderosa,
If you think you have a complaint, make it. If you think you have a case, make it. Put up or shut up. Your assertion that “We the People” is a legal fiction is prime facie ridiculous and deserves ridicule. If you’ve got a problem with that, you know where to take it.
“Fraud is kaleidoscopic, infinite. [And that] being infinite and taking on protean form at will, were courts to cramp themselves by defining fraud with a hard-and-fast definition, their jurisdiction would be cunningly circumvented at once by new schemes beyond the definition….. Accordingly definitions of fraud are of set purpose left general and flexible and thereto courts match their astuteness against the versatile inventions of fraud-doers.”
(Stonemets v. Head, 248 Mo. 243, 263, 154 S.W. 108, 114 (1913).
Gene H, you know there is a way to state that argument without the personal attacks?
I was going to explain the concept to you over in the good law/bad law thread but you ran away. I can do still do it later today, but I don’t want to set you off on more disruptions since no one can disagree with your precious, albeit wrong, views.
Bob,
“I first ask how you intend to replace the conceptual foundation of our republic”
I dont.
Your poker analogy would be spot on, if and only if, at the beginning of the game one player was allowed to change the rules at any time. I may be mistaken but i perceive regulations, not as a means to redress damages but an attempt to stem damages before they happen, making them hubristic attempts at precognition.