An Appeal to Libertarians Concerning Occupy Wall Street

This long-form post is adapted from a note I wrote on Facebook last week.
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Occupy Wall Street. It appears to have a knowledge-enthusiasm gap that rivals the Tea Party, with a much higher ironic beard/glasses/t-shirt quotient. It’s tempting to mock all the unemployed hipsters using their iPhones to kvetch about the corporatocracy as they swill Coca-cola. Seeing that level of obtuseness up close is frustrating, to say the least, and it’s understandable if you want to deliver a swift kick to the gonads of the lot of them, just for the sake of future generations.

But, hold on a second. Last time I checked, aren’t we against bailouts and crony capitalism (a.k.a. capitalism), too? Remember how we have gay friends, and immigrant friends, and how we like freedom of expression, and we hate thug cops, and all that good stuff?

Now, granted, I’m not following the OWS news too closely. Hell, I don’t even own a TV. But many of you know that I identify as an a-political, disaffected liberaltarian. I like my people free and respected, my governments small, my internet unregulated, and my cigarettes in whatever goddamn bar cares to have my patronage, thankyouverymuch. I find social conservatism, war-hawking, Che Guevara T-shirts, and the people who believe that “we” (they; the government) can “improve” (change) other people utterly… unpalatable.

But I think we’re getting a little cocky in our mockery of the hipster protest. Gotchas! like these are the same kind of cheap shot Elizabeth Warren made with her “social contract” soapbox. And it strikes me as pure asshattery to yell at these people to “get a job” when there aren’t actually any jobs to be had. I do not envy my peers who took on loads of (market-distorting, federally-guaranteed) student debt (that enriched the universities more than anyone else) on the premise that college degrees open the door to well-paying jobs, then had the misfortune of graduating during the middle of what increasingly looks to be a long deleveraging recession that will permanently alter their lifetime earnings. (And let’s be real: many of you going on about how awesome this guy is – you didn’t scrimp and save and graduate debt-free either. You were just lucky enough to get out before the economy turned into a shit sandwich. You do not win moral high horse points for having lucky timing.)

The problem is that these young liberalish kids, with their accepting views on gay marriage, immigration and civil liberties, have an ass-backwards understanding of economics, and I’m not just talking supply and demand here. I mean the whole cornucopia of economic concepts including incentives, unintended consequences, public choice theory, and human action. They’ve got to figure out that the centralized, socialist solution that they think will solve everything is still going to be rife with lobbying, special interests and political favors, and that the politically-connected are still going to be reaping all the benefits. Because that by its very nature is what the polity does.

It’s true that many of the more radical OWS protesters have a die-hard ideological commitment to the profits-are-evil tribe. But unlike the social values that pervade the Tea Party – xenophobia, racism, sexism, homophobia, god-baggery – the economic illiteracy of the masses can be abated. (Proof? You’re reading it). Education, informed and passionate debate, and empirical evidence can change people’s minds about the merits of centralized government. Just like how the sheltered conservative kid will sometimes become a libertarian when he meets gay friends in college, young liberals can become bleeding-heart libertarians. Obviously, this doesn’t apply to the true-believing fringe, but I believe these people are the minority, and there’s just no point in arguing with that level of stupid anyway (and to be fair, we’ve got our weirdos, too. #glasshouses).

Anyway, we need to can the attitude. Last week, David Harsanyi’s piece at Reason got passed around Facebook like a bag of Franzia at a sorority sleepover. The column struck me as crass, self-congratulatory, and showed a willfully superficial understanding of what’s going on in Liberty Plaza. It felt like it was deliberately written to gain pats on the back from conservatives and libertarians. Harsanyi preached to the conservative choir and didn’t change a single mind, nor move the needle at all. Libertarians should be better than this. Damn it, we are better than this.

So what I’m suggesting is: how about instead of making fun of these unemployed hipster kids and calling them stupid and yelling at them to get jobs, how about we give their grievances some serious scrutiny? It’s a disheartening prospect to be leave college with a mountain of debt and no job prospects. And there are a lot of less-privileged people out there for whom the situation is far, far more dire. Obama has proven himself to be a worthless president who reneged on the war, drug policy, civil liberties, closing Gitmo, Hope, Change, the implicit guarantee that he’d know what the heck he’s doing, and everything else he promised. Sure, he threw a bone to progressives in repealing DADT, but he’s still throwing nonviolent drug offenders – mostly minorities – in jail, still using flying robots to kill muslims, and still having his goons humiliate anybody who dares to take a commercial flight. There are some commonalities between us and the angry liberal types, and we’ve got the advantage of having solutions that are much better than More Centralized Power, More Oversight, Always Elect The Right People, and so on.

I think, at the heart of all of this, the problem lies with how many Americans view the federal government and its proper function. My intuition is that in the decades since the New Deal, or perhaps the Civil Rights Act, a large subsection of Americans, particularly those young enough to not experience the Vietnam era or the Carter years, have developed a naive idea of what government is. I think that they think the government, having won the cold war and put an end to legally-sanctioned racism, is a force for good. A means for the compassionate statesmen and civil servants to look out for the little guy. The government doesn’t just represent the will of the people – it literally is “we the people.” We learn our 10 amendments in high school history, and about how Lincoln ended slavery and Franklin ended the holocaust and the depression, and we get this idea that since we’re basically good people, and the government represents us, then naturally, the government must be a force for good.

And as Captain Mal Reynolds reckoned: “Half of writing history is hidin’ the truth.”

So let’s try to have a little less smarter-than-thou snark, and a little more impassioned, engaged discussion. Less of this uninspired Harsanyi drivel, and more of that kid who went down to the protest and preached for states rights (and even drew some applause!). Less thinly-veiled skepticism when we ask whether this is a “real social movement,” and a little more effort in crafting our message that concentrated political power is the problem, not the solution. Let’s try to reach out to the social justice people, instead of letting the Obama Machine/Liberals-In-Name-Only co-opt this sentiment and allay it with promises of entitlements that will never come.

Maybe all this will blow over once the fall weather settles above New York City. Maybe it will just get reabsorbed back into the New York liberal machine. But hey, they’re doing more than just posting a cartoon character or the color of their bras on Facebook. That’s got to count for something.

Gary Johnson should be all over this shit.