Thursdays with John Hayward 10.06.11
Three weeks into the “Occupy Wall Street” protests, the disorganized mob of shiftless protesters is receiving fresh shock troops from Big Labor. An article at Business Insiderlists the new arrivals: “United NY, SEIU 1199, United Federation of Teachers, Working Families Party, andMoveOn.org. The Transit Workers and AFL-CIO are also expected to participate.”
The protesters romantically bill themselves as anarchists, which has attracted some lovestruck admirers from the dreary conventional Left. On the contrary, those union thugs are pouring into Wall Street because they understand that anarchy is the handmaiden of tyranny. Anarchist movements are never followed by increased liberty.
The first wave of OWS protesters will hardly be unwilling victims of the organized hard-Left takeover. They’ve been on the same page all along. They’ve got a website, and they eventually got around to posting a long manifesto of demands required to “end the occupation.” All of these demands require the exercise of compulsive government force on a massive scale.
>From “free” education and health care, to guaranteed “living wages,” the forced abandonment of fossil fuels, and the forgiveness of all debt on a planetary scale, these demands would require the forcible seizure of private property, and the compulsion of “desirable” behavior by an immense government of nearly limitless power. Far from agitating for any species of liberty, even the kind envisioned by the hopelessly lazy and disaffected, these protesters are demanding the final dissolution of economic liberty.
Occupy Wall Street sounds stupid and crazy, but there are people like the AFL-CIO, and the degenerate hard-left Democrat Party, who have plenty of uses for stupid and crazy foot soldiers, after “liberal thinkers” and helpful media allies have cleaned them up a bit. — John Hayward