Obama uses ‘Occupy Wall Street’ language in weekly address

In his weekly address to the nation, Obama cited an economic report showing that the middle class has lost ground to “the top one percent.”

“The average income for the top one percent of Americans has risen almost seven times faster than the income of the average middle class family,” he said. “And this has happened during a period where the cost of everything from health care to college has skyrocketed.”

“The average income for the top one percent of Americans has risen almost seven times faster than the income of the average middle class family,” he said.

Bammer and the OWS gangs believe wealth has to be "redistributed." In order to believe that, they have to look at all the wealth around them and believe it has always existed, even in caveman times. Ridiculous? Of course, but think about it; these people have absolutely no concept of productivity or the distinction between producers and non-producers. Collectivist demonstrators even carry signs with such absurdities as "America can't afford to have millionaires." They look at Bill Gates, for example, not just with envy, but with hatred. Here is a man who has doubled, tripled, and even quadrupled the productivity of millions of people, and yet they cannot comprehend that he was motivated by, and deserves, to have made, billions of dollars -- by creating billions of dollars worth of wealth which never existed before, for himself and millions of others. These burger-flipper-wannabes have no concept of what it takes to make decisions like, "Should I expand or close a billion-dollar division of this company and coordinate and expedite all that that entails?"
Think about this: ABOUT THAT "GAP" BETWEEN RICH AND POOR

They look at Bill Gates, for example, not just with envy, but with hatred. Here is a man who has doubled, tripled, and even quadrupled the productivity of millions of people, and yet they cannot comprehend that he was motivated by, and deserves, to have made, billions of dollars -- by creating billions of dollars worth of wealth which never existed before, for himself and millions of others.

I'm not sure this is true. I believe many of the OWS types recognize that Bill and Steve Jobs and other entrepenuers who have actually created businesses and generated wealth deserve much though perhaps not all of the wealth they have accumulated.

I believe much of the resentment against the 1% is a largely accurate perception that many of these people did not "earn" their money by creating wealth. Instead they used connections, position and influence to extort wealth from society as a whole. This applies especially to the financial wizards, hedge fund types and so forth. And even more especially to those bailed out recently by governments.

Not being a financial wizard myself, I find it difficult to see what benefit they provide to society that justifies their being so lavishly rewarded. Does arbitraging currencies, creating junk bond packages and devising derivatives really benefit society so much? Or is much of this activity genuinely detrimental to society on a net basis? Are these guys creating wealth, or are they just moving it around and in the process siphoning off immense amounts for their own profit, depleting that available for more productive uses?

I don't claim to know the answers to these questions, but I do know conservatives need to be able to answer them, not just have a knee jerk reaction defending all possible actions of "business."

I would be very interested in knowledgeable responses why such income is or is not justified from a benefit to society standpoint.

Good Point. Didn’t Obama claim we were going to save $2500 annually from Obamacare in our premiums?

Consider copying this into your email composing window and sharing it wherever it might do some good (ESPECIALLY to anyone in OHIO before going to the polls on TUESDAY!:

Is OBAMACARE the runaway winner of the "America's Worst Idea" contest, or what?
Now, let me get this straight . . . We're going to be "gifted" with a health care plan we are forced to purchase and fined if we don't, that was supposed to "lower" health insurance costs but caused premiums to jump 9.5% THIS YEAR ALONE, which purportedly covers at least ten million more people, without adding a single new doctor, but provides for 16,000 new IRS agents, a militarized civilian "ready reserve corps" and 33 new government committees to make decisions for us and our doctor, authorized by a 2,500 page bill written by a congressional committee whose chairman says he doesn't understand it, passed by a Congress that didn't read it but exempted themselves from it, and signed by a President who smokes, with funding administered by a Treasury chief who didn't pay his taxes but will make sure we pay ours, for which we'll be taxed for four years before any benefits take effect and which takes hundreds of billions away from Medicare, yet scored by a non-partisan Congressional Budget Office that says it will add another TRILLION dollars to the national debt anyway, all to be overseen by a Surgeon General who is obese, and financed by a government that is already broke and has already bankrupted Social Security and Medicare, is that right? Who could ever find anything wrong with that?

-- Yes, please DO pass it along ------>

Friedrich Hayek pointed out that the essential practical flaw of socialism is price discovery: without markets, people cannot gauge demand or supply accurately and the result is shortages, poverty and rationing.

Markets are essential and valuable - without price discovery an economy dies.

What hedge funds and banks do is to make markets in every business and commodity, millions of times a day, every day. They provide the price discovery that has caused productivity to increase to its current levels. Because of their work, investors and lenders have information about the market value of everything in real time.

In order to do this, they assume a great deal of risk and a large percentage of funds fail every year. And, contrary to popular belief, bankers and traders are actually not as well paid as corporate managers or lawyers. For every billionaire fund manager there are one thousand sales traders making less than a unionized government school administrator.

But many so-called "conservatives" seem to have as much irrational hatred and fear of the price discoverers as socialists do.

Yes, thanks. I remember in 2007 all the know-nothings claiming that "speculators" had driven up the price of oil; this is a conspiracy theory as old as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Although at least Protocols had a phony document to back it up. The claim that "speculators" are spiking a market as large as the oil futures trade doesn't even have as little as that going for it. By what mechanism "speculators" have been achieving these nefarious miracles has never been explained. That doesn't stop the haters.

As for OWS, a "conservative" actually thinks they have valid points to make. Oh, that's OK then? No. How you arrive at your conclusions is more important than the conclusions themselves are. Crony Capitalism (aka, Actual Fascism) isn't wrong because people are making money at it; it's wrong because people are losing money at it. Big money. Rewarding greedy criminals isn't what free markets do; it is what corrupt governments do, though.

Thank you for the response.

It is generally agreed (although quite possibly inaccurately) that financial rewards have shifted in recent decades to a quite significant degree from those producing goods and services to those who shift money and investments around. Banking, for example, used to be a staid and generally conservative business. Successful banking executives became rich, but seldom quickly.

Things have obviously changed, and I wonder if this is entirely for the good. While your point about price discovery is a good one, it seems unlikely to me that recent improvements in this area fully justify such a massive shift in financial rewards. If anything, it seems that technology would tend to automate price discovery and reduce its cost. Whereas this cost, as a percentage of total economic production, seems to have gone up dramatically.

Thank you for the response.

You are creating a false distinction between "producing goods and services" and the service known as price discovery.

Price discovery is as good and valuable and noble as any other private service sold in the market. There is no rationale, other than hidden bias, to characterize it as less useful or morally inferior to architectural planning or warehouse logistics or any other similar service.

Additionally, as I have pointed out, the wages of the average nonmanagerial finance worker have declined in relation to that of attorneys and civil employees over the past decade. This is due indeed to improved techniques of price discovery through automated trading systems, etc. As a result, far fewer people work in finance than did a decade ago, and the people who remain have more specialized skillsets.

What is true of Wall Street, and law firms, and manufacturing companies and software companies and government bureaucracies is that those who are in managerial roles, especially in executive roles, have seen their remuneration growth rates far outstrip those of their remaining employees.

Yet Wall Street is singled out again and again as if law firm partners and software CEOs and education superintendents were scraping by on minimum wages.

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