The popular slogan of the Occupy movement is, “We are the 99%!” This slogan implies that there is a sinister one percent of the population that’s causing the current economic and social strife. Do you know what? Those protesters are right. Do you know what else? It’s not the one percent they think it is:
But there is another 1 percent out there, those who do live parasitically off the population and exploit the 99 percent. Moreover, there is a long intellectual tradition, dating back to the late Middle Ages, that draws attention to the strange reality that a tiny minority lives off the productive labor of the overwhelming majority.
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In the end, we end up with about 3 million people who constitute what is commonly called the state. For short, we can just call these people the 1 percent.
The top one precent of wealth holders isn’t the group causing our problems, the roughly one percent of the population that makes up the federal government. While those two groups aren’t mutually exclusive the latter group is the only one that can make rules, regulations, and ordinances that have a nationwide effect of further destroying our economy:
Same goals, different means, two very different sets of criminals. The state is the institution that essentially redefines criminal wrongdoing to make itself exempt from the law that governs everyone else.
It is the same with every tax, every regulation, every mandate, and every single word of the federal code. It all represents coercion. Even in the area of money and banking, it is the state that created and sustains the Fed and the dollar, because it forcibly limits competition in money and banking, preventing people from making gold or silver money, or innovating in other ways. And in some ways, this is the most dreadful intervention of all, because it allows the state to destroy our money on a whim.
Simply eliminating the Federal Reserve and the problems it generates would move our country towards recovery and eventual reclaiming of our past economic prosperity. Removing a massive number of labor regulations from the books would also help decrease unemployment and allow people to once again make a living. And you know what? With a return to sound money you would effectively have “more” money as it wouldn’t be constantly devaluing due to inflation. If the value of our money would just stabilize we’d all be wealthier immediately.
So let’s fight the real culprits, the actual one percent that’s the source of our woes. Drop all of this pointless screaming about the top one percent of wealth holders being evil bastards who are destroying our lives. Many of those wealth holders are employing a great number of people and providing products that many in society enjoy. Instead let’s point the finger at the federal government, the bastards who have created the environment of failure that has caused our current economic crisis.