Occupy your noggin

Is it just me or do people in the "Occupy" movement seem mostly interested in occupying their time? They'd be better off trying to occupy that vast empty space between their ears; but why bother when someone will give you a slogan and armband for free.

The whole thing is starting to look like an amateurish knockoff of European austerity protests. Now those people know how to riot.

Carl Graham

In the beginning it included Ron Paul conservatives with "End the Fed" signs and a lot of ordinary people with legitimate gripes about bailouts and corporate cronyism (but I repeat myself). Now, though, it's mostly the standard agitprop by anarchists and communists that gets trotted out anytime sanitation rules are relaxed,

In fact, one of my favorite themes is that we need to end government corruption by growing government. Of course. And I plan to get skinny again by hanging out at buffets.

Here's a thought. Rather than fighting government corruption by adding more layers of corruptible government, how about we fight government corruption by removing the reasons for corrupting it in the first place? Let's remove the odor rather than buy a new air freshener.

And that odor we smell is crony capitalism. It's government picking winners and losers, and people paying to be on the winners' list.

Take Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. With all the focus on the 1 percent, it would be forgivable to have missed that these government sponsored businesses, which are on track to lose upwards of $120 billion in bailout funds, just paid their top executives nearly $13 million in bonuses. Funny we didn't see the Occupy Wall Street protesters marching by their headquarters.

Funny we didn't see them marching by the White House, either. Another odor coming from those sanitation-free zones across the country is the idea of equal incomes, and according to census data U.S. incomes have never been more unequal than they are right now under the current administration.

But here's a nugget the protesters can chew on to occupy their minds. Incomes are never equal. Politburo members were wildly better off than average Soviet citizens. The elite in socialist or despotic countries are always richer than the masses whose lives they've taken it as their burden to look after. And, of course, Washington, D.C., is one of the few places where employment and incomes are growing, even in this economy.

The truth is that the poorest Americans live better than the majority of the world's inhabitants, and have comforts that "the 1 percent" didn't dream of 100 or even 50 years ago. Prosperity isn't zero sum. It doesn't come from equal incomes; it comes from the increased incomes that reasonably regulated free markets make possible. And all incomes can and do rise if people are allowed to reap the fruits of their labors.

The relevant question isn't about equal outcomes, but about how opportunity is allocated. If government picks winners and losers only the favored will prosper and the Bill Gates' of the world will never get out of their garages. If we are equal under the law, though, that protects the right to use our talents, ambitions, interests and even luck to achieve our potential. Government can and should protect that right, but it should not allocate it.

I'll never understand those who think that by putting something in government's hands, it will somehow be artfully and magnanimously managed. Government is people; people who come from the same gene pool as the rest of us. There are the same percentages of good, bad, competent and incompetent in government as anywhere else. You wouldn't hand your health care, family, faith, or any other important decisions over to Google or General Motors. Why would you hand them over to another bunch of people who are even less accountable and know less about you?

We should all be free to reach for our potential. But government picking winners and losers only helps the connected few. We ought to occupy ourselves changing that.

(Carl Graham is president of the Montana Policy Institute in Bozeman.)