Questions
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The Occupy Movement has many questions and few answers:
It has quite a few angles to observe it from. One that seems to summarize its intent is what might be called the Retrofit movement, the real intent of the occupy movement is to take over. It is a political movement based upon socialistic principles.
Biking along recently I noticed a Prius with several bumper stickers - “ Obama 2012”, and another that said a great deal: “Retrofit America”. Clearly the owner was quite supportive of a continued social engineering agenda that went much further than the current administration has achieved. What seems to be the common factor in their thinking is the notion that the central authority is the only thing standing between us and chaos. Needless to say that the other side of this perspective is more concerned about the central authority out of control and taking us into chaos.
Retrofit anything might mean returning us to strong values centered on individual reliance and determination. It is clearly not the case with Obama’s agenda who says about the other side in this election that they want to return to the “Economics of you are on your own.” This blatant statement of the need for dependency by the public on a central authority does not stop at low interest rates for students and free contraception. It continues into all aspects of our lives.
The methods of this central control theory is to keep increasing favoring one group over another and seeking an equal outcome in such things as income. There does not seem to be a point at which this reaches a steady state, meaning it just keeps increasing. Most of the selling points are quite emotional, declarations of truth, and the demonizing of the opposition. The increase in central power to achieve this seems to have no limits either. We are increasingly subjected to more rules and laws. These laws in recent years have become more complex and far reaching. Take ObamaCare and Dodd-Frank financial regulations, and both are over 2,00 pages and are establishing large bureaucracies outside normal future legislative review.
Dodd-Frank does not solve the main drivers in the last financial crisis: emphasis on low cost mortgages and “too big to fail.” The latter is enhanced and low cost mortgages continue in some sectors. Fannie and Freddie continue to take on a large portion of the loans and with backing from the government. Having government in the command seat on extending risk to favor one group over another has led to increased concerns and bad outcomes. Having realized these outcomes, the crisis was not wasted and even larger central control power and little to no change in the original causes.
ObamaCare continues to confuse the issue of healthcare. With the demonizing of the Ryan Budget, ObamaCare seeks to cut significant amount of money from Medicare while decrying the Ryan budget as a threat to Medicare. This politicizing of the issue has the back drop that Medicare is headed towards bankruptcy under current or ObamaCare conditions. So this pill will cause loss of care and this pill will set you free to make decisions. Continued attacks on making Medicare viable are coming from all of the liberal sirens: NYT to the current administration. The original assumptions that went into the CBO analysis on cost reduction with ObamaCare have largely been destroyed, leaving us with the reality that healthcare will continue a strong cost increase in the future to the point where it is an industry in trouble.
With healthcare shooting up to perhaps above 20% of GDP, with the Fed Gov. rising to 25% of GDP, and the financial sector coming under more and more control by the Fed Gov. – are we not at risk of being a centrally controlled economy?
We are left with questions and few answers. Youth in general are well disposed towards a social democracy, a socialism of some variant or another. With the large unemployment rates of the 18 - 24 year olds, the frustration is understandable. What they ultimately decide to do with all of their frustrations will determine what kind of country we have: Greece, France, of what the USA used to be.
The spirit of the Occupy movement gained a lot of sympathy. After all it was against the big bailouts. But what does this movement really mean?