The occupiers are barking up the wrong tree. The problem isn’t capitalism — it’s government power.

A Tea Party Response to the Occupiers by Manny Edwards on November 4, 2011 StumbleUponDiggRedditGoogle BuzzEmailPrintShare The occupiers are barking up the wrong tree. The problem isn’t capitalism — it’s government power. They’re right to complain about big bank bailouts, but capitalists can’t do this in a free market. Only the government can steal money from taxpayers and give it to the banks. ACORN’s involvement in organizing the Occupiers is proof that they’re simply doing the bidding of the ruling elite; while they might not know it, the Occupiers are acting as their useful idiots. Socialist movements always use such dupes to give them the cover of “popular demand.” What they don’t understand — and what the Tea Party most certainly does understand — is that free markets are NOT pro-business. The operation of a free market requires businesses to work very hard — in other words, compete — to earn your business. This works in favor of the consumer, not the producer. When producers are forced to compete to earn your business, they have to keep their costs down and produce their product or service better and cheaper than the others. This spreads the wealth in a way socialists can’t comprehend: It forces the producers to compete for the best workers, paying them more and keeping less for themselves, all while providing better products and services at lower prices, which increases the consumer’s own capital. This flattens the bell curve, don’t you know. But if producers can instead use the power of government to squash competition and bail themselves out of bankruptcy, they tend to do so. Duh. The Founders of the United States understood this. They knew that the power of government was dangerous to individual liberty; they created a government that was very limited in its ability to exercise power, precisely so it could not dispense the kind of favors we see it dispensing today. Government “stimulus” and bailouts are completely unconstitutional… but who cares? Well, the Tea Party does. Evidently, the Occupiers don’t. I don’t expect to persuade many of them. They’ve been indoctrinated by the state, and you can’t expect the state to teach the very principles of liberty which are antithetical to its power. The Occupiers would have you think that since the government stole once and gave to the banks, we should have it steal again and give the loot to the Occupiers so they can get free stuff, like college, cars, houses, shoes, lunches, whatever. All that does is make them thieves, like the banks, and us the victims of theft — again. There’s a unbridgeable difference between us and them. They want to be the new beneficiaries of the government’s redistributive power. We want to abolish it. The ultimate irony in the Occupiers’ position is that all while decrying the greed and corruption of capitalism, they seek to capitalize us. All economic systems are capitalistic; the battle is over what will be treated as a resource in the system. We who respect individual liberty treat only the land (and all its appurtenances) as the resource, but the government, its crony banks, and the Occupiers all treat people as a resource by taking our productivity by force to sustain themselves. We in the Tea Party have only one option — the occupiers, ACORN, and the ruling elite must be defeated. The only way we can regain liberty is to reduce the scope and power of a government that has chosen to ignore its constitutional limitations. If there’s any place this can be done, it’s here. If we don’t relight the beacon of liberty, the world will remain a dark place indeed. For Liberty, Manny Edwards