Christian Science Monitor: The difference between OWS and Vietnam

[LAGC]

The Occupy protesters imagine that they stand in a great tradition of American radicalism, willing to stand up to the man and risk arrest in order to achieve their goals. The most obvious case of such a mass movement would be the anti-war protests of the 1960s. They started small and grew and grew until they became mainstream and actually affected a dramatic policy change. The U.S. military pulled out of Vietnam, implicitly conceding defeat and mourning the long history of calamity.

But consider the gigantic differences. The Vietnam protest movement had a clear goal. It wanted to end the war. It had a clear enemy: the politicians and bureaucrats who wanted the war to last forever. It had a clear message: this war is wrong. It had an intense motivation: the protesters were terrified of being drafted to kill and be killed. This is what standing up to power is all about.

So far as anyone can tell, the Occupy movement has none of this clarity. Ten thousand articles have been written on these people and there is still no consensus concerning what the issue really is. The goals of the movement are posted here and there, but not everyone among the protesters agrees with them. The motivation is just as amorphous and varied: unemployment, sinking job prospects, sinking incomes, blowback from the bailouts, the desire to slum around in a decadent sort of way, and the destructive urge to trample down the pea-patch of life itself.
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The real problem with the OWS movement is its political naiveté. The protestors imagine that by attacking free enterprise and the capitalist system they are upholding the rights of the common man. The exact opposite is true. The only real alternative to free enterprise is an economy owned and administered by society’s most ruthless and cruel elements, who always seems to gravitate toward statist means.
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http://www.csmonitor.com/Business/Mises-Economics/2011/1122/The-difference-between-OWS-and-Vietnam

:puke:

Someone tell me these right-wing tools aren't representative of most Christians out there...

[MineralMan]

1. Actually, the comparison should be to the civil rights movement,

earlier in the 1960s. That's a closer parallel to the OWS movement. It's interesting to examine what happened then. It took a very long time before federal power was brought to bear. Too long, but that's our system of government.

[Xipe Totec]

2. Equating it to Vietnam is deliberately disengenuous. Equate it to Hooverville

They go out of their way to avoid the obvious allusion to the great depression.

[patrice]

3. "right-wing tools aren't representative of ..." Never underestimate the reach of Dominionism.

Even if something doesn't call itself Dominionism, the principles are the same.

Principles driven by "at will" employment, which is LEGALIZED DISCRIMINATION = "Support our political/economic power, or else!!!"

[LAGC]

6. I love how they bash the concept of the minimum wage.

Raising the minimum wage, for example, amounts to a limitation on the rights of workers to negotiate their own employment contracts. The minimum wage says: you have no right to offer less for your services than the state gives you permission to offer. Thus, the minimum wage not only promotes unemployment; it restrains the human right to associate on any terms of a person’s choosing.

Yeah, I'm sure everyone would just LOVE to work for only $3 an hour. No, make that $3 a day. :eyes:

[patrice]

8. Plus the fact that they never corelate no minimum wage with oppression of real value in theirmarkets

If people can't make enough to sustain themselves, the huge majority of them do not develop their aptitudes and skills (potential market values) to the fullest, thus the so-called free market(s) LOSE those economic values which would have come from fully developed individual citizens, which lost values further oppresses the development of markets, which fact further oppresses the development of individual economic potentials.

No minimum wage is a vicious fucking circle.

I support a concept of custom-designed work:hours:benefits:wages, but unions should be the most powerful arbiters for the workers who create their own economic plans, within a framework that has a FLOOR that collectively defends freedom and is defined by agreements amongst free Americans and manifested in those whom they elect to authentically represent them in free campaigns & elections.

[Vincardog]

4. Orwell speak "The only real alternative to free enterprise (an economy owned and administered by

society’s most ruthless and cruel elements),
is an economy owned and administered by society’s most ruthless and cruel elements,
who always seems to gravitate toward statist means.
GEE CSM project much?

[PETRUS]

5. Implicit acknowledgement of complexity should not be confused with lack of clarity.

I'm glad OWS isn't playing the whack-a-mole game of issue-oriented protest.

[Jim__]

7. Jeffrey Tucker - Ludwig von Mises Institute.

From wikipedia:

Jeffrey Albert Tucker is the editorial vice president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, a think tank that espouses the Austrian School of economics. He is the current webmaster for the institute's website, Mises.org.

Enough said.

[LAGC]

9. So why is the Christian Science Monitor pimping him?

Do you not think many Christians agree with their views?

[Jim__]

10. You'd have to ask them.

I have no idea who agrees with von Mises or Jeffrey Tucker.

[MarkCharles]

11. Why does the faith that calls itself "Christian Science" reject so much of

science?

I suppose this is off-topic,since the paper has little if anything to do with the church's faith, but Christians seem to spend an inordinate amount of time mis-labeling their particular faith to be something it is not.