Occupy Wall Street Response #GBE2

This is partially a response to Beth's post here about the Occupy Wall Street protests: http://www.word-nerd-speaks.com/2011/10/occupy-wall-street-restoring-balance.html

But it's also a collection of my recent thoughts about the subjects that these protests have brought up. Just for background, I was brought up in a fairly strongly liberal household, and I share those liberal views for the most part, particularly when it comes to social issues. When it comes to government and economics, though, I am ambivalent. I have several years of schooling in Economics, which leaves me largely conflicted about the positives and negatives of both government and free market capitalism. One thing I can say is that I strongly disdain anyone who believes that a simplistic, one-answer-fits-all approach is the correct way to view either. For example, those that believe that the government should just "get out of the way" and let the free market provide all the answers to our society's problems. I am equally disdainful, however, of those that believe that having government solve all of our problems and direct the way our entire economy and society should function.

I tend not to be a protester, instead I always find myself taking on the role of the analyst. It's something I'm good at and something I enjoy. When I analyze the current situation, one factor jumps immediately to the forefront: leverage. Whenever we've had struggles between the rich and powerful and the masses, the best weapon the masses have ever had is leverage. For example, in the post war era there was a boom in factory and engineering jobs. The factories needed tons of reliable workers. The Unions were able to leverage this need into a negotiating structure that provided higher wages, better benefits and better working conditions for millions of workers. Today's unions have some remaining leverage, but the corporations have recently gained an extremely important advantage - geographic flexibility in placing their factories and thus their workers. The engineers had a different type of leverage - the rarity of their skill sets. They were the only ones who knew how to design and build all that stuff that needed to be built. Again, today's engineers have a problem of geographic competition - the millions of skilled college graduates being churned out of Indian, Chinese and other worldwide universities. Individuals and organized groups attempting to regain their power against the power of corporations and the wealthy no longer have anywhere near the leverage that they had fifty years ago.

If this protest movement has any one unifying theme that I can discern, it is that the rich and powerful, particularly corporations, have too much power and too much money. The protesters have a list of abuses a mile long that they want rectified. Again, I come back to leverage. Why are they able to get away with all the transgressions listed? Why bail out the corporations and not the individual homeowners? Why are the regulatory agencies for every industry dominated by CEO's and lobbyists from the corporations they're supposed to rein in? Why does it seem like regulations always make the job hardest on the smallest businesses and individuals, while leaving the largest corporations with an easy path to legality? Leverage. It's like a legal case where only one side is making an argument. The other side (the average person and average small business) doesn't even get to present their side, or if they do, no one is listening or no one cares.

So, how does the average man and average business regain leverage? Well, this blog is about ideas, and here's my idea: a demand union. This new type of union would have very specific demands and the numerical clout to make them known and to enforce whatever backlash remedy will be required to ensure that the corporations, the powerful, the government, whoever clearly get the message and are forced to take immediate and decisive action. I don't know that anything like that can come out of this movement, but it's possible.

I mentioned to a friend earlier this year that I thought it was interesting to watch the Republican Party tear itself in two thanks to the Tea Party movement, which I think is a natural reaction to the Republican tendency to campaign on small government and then, once in power, to rely upon big government spending and debt financing. I have also felt that the Democrats were likely to go through a similar restructuring because there is a growing realization that the New Deal programs and the Labor Unions that dominate the politics of the Party are anachronisms. I suspect that this movement, if it coalesces around anything, will begin that process. One can only hope.