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#OccupyWallStreet as The Egyptian Revolution? It Might Be A Good Simile.

…the rational herdsman concludes that the only sensible course for him to pursue is to add another animal to his herd. And another; and another… But this is the conclusion reached by each and every rational herdsman sharing a commons. Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit–in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.

– Garret Hardin Science Magazine

The ongoing outcome of the #OWS protests in NYC is predictable. Garret Hardin nailed it back in the intellectual hay-day of the American Environmental Movement. Hardin described the impact of the absence of accurate prices as The Tragedy of The Commons. He describes the society where the commons are free and no limits like mortgage standards or having to pay back student loans exist. We see the micro level of this happening already as the protest maunders on.

“They want to take showers, want to wash up and use the toilet paper to dry up. It becomes … you gotta have one person assigned just to clean the bathrooms,” said Steve Zamfotis, manager of “Charley’s” restaurant. Zamfotis, who runs a pizza shop directly across the street from Zuccotti Park, said he has to stand guard at the door — just to keep protesters out. “They expect everything, everything for free, nothing to pay,” Zamfotis said.

(HT: CBS News)

As Garret Hardin accurately foresaw, the free stuff army has descended upon the hipster commune at Zuccoti Park.

As the “Occupy Wall Street” protests enter their fourth week, donations of food and clothes have been appreciated not only by actual protesters, but also by an unwelcome crowd of freeloaders. “Basically the tourists take all the food and the hipsters take all the clothes,” one Brooklyn artist told 1010 WINS’ Sonia Rincon. “It’s a shame, but there are a few people out there doing that,” another protester said.

CBS New York

There will be more and more people doing this. Any economic model that models the demand against the price of valuable items will predict infinite demand when the price approaches “free.” This isn’t just math, this is human psychology. Prices are nature’s way of preventing sparse resources from being pillaged like Rome during a Visigoth Holiday.

This is where the #OWS movement can be accurately compared to the Egyptian Revolution. In Egypt, the old order has been thrown off in reaction to the burdens of forced scarcity. Hard-working people suffer the Punishment of Sisyphus in Egypt. David Goldman describes hardship far worse than the triple-digit student loan against the BA in Interpretive Dance Therapy below.

If Egypt’s labor force were counted in the same way as America’s, the unemployment rate would be 40%. The effective unemployment rate is even higher, for three-fifths of Egyptians live on the land, while the country imports half its caloric consumption.

(Asia Times)

The Egyptians rose up and killed the king in response to this vile duress. This solved nothing. The people occupied Tahrir Square. Show ‘em what they win, Dom Pardo!

“The magnitude of capital flight from Egypt right now is roughly 10 times the aid promised to Egypt by the United States and Europe combined,” or $130 billion a year, more than twice the capitalization of Egypt’s stock exchange, according to the Jerusalem Post,…

Niall Ferguson (Asia Times)

The Facebook! Jockeys celebrate, but the unicorns still don’t exist. The previously scarce resources aren’t undergoing reproductive cell-division to make The People’s Committee happy. There isn’t any manna raining down from heaven and neither the Holy Qur’an nor the Sacred Tao of Facebook tells the jerry-built government how to feed a mob of staving sub-literates.

Thus, the People’s Committee in Egypt does what nature tells them they have to. They figure out which bands of sub-literates are no longer valued enough to continue feeding. The Muslim Brotherhood pretty much pimps the thugs currently misruling Egypt. I’ll give you three guess at who isn’t getting any dog biscuits. You don’t have to guess, Powerline tells us what is happening in Egypt as a direct result of The Glorious Facebook Revelution.

Altogether, at least 25 Christians have been murdered. Verum Serum has more, including sickening footage of a Christian protester being surrounded and beaten with clubs by Muslim security forces who are joined by Muslim civilians.

As a Christian, the emotional side of my brain takes this stuff personally. As a rational reader of history, I can only say “What did people expect?” People like the #OWS People’s Committee will never produce anything of worth or value. They will never admit that prices have a legitimate and vital role in the natural order of human society. If they ever get power in America, they will suddenly discover “The Obama Dude” has, like, a bummer of a job!

Giving people like the Owsers professional responsibility can only end in one way. They prove themselves wholly incapable of acknowledging, much less solving The Tragedy of The Commons. After this obvious failure, the harder men, more willing to spike your face off the pavement; then get their hands on the means of coercion. The men of peace and men of dignity find themselves about where the Coptic Christians are now. This how a successful #OWS Movement would be exactly like The Glorious Facebook Revolution. I congratulate the fawning MSM on their apt and fitting analogy.

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COMMENTS

  • johnt

    it is no wonder they start to emerge from under the rocks, and multiply. Different types, ideological and otherwise, but the same basic attitudes. Interesting to see the mainstream left defending these people, but why not, it’s what they have working towards for years.
    Noteworthy are the obscene comparisons to the Tea Party, who never occupied, and for days, never dirtied a place they were in,always respected themselves and where they were. Corruption breeds such mental aberrations as to equate these two groups.

    • Repair_Man_Jack

      And a lot of this is what the left has spent decades asking for.

      • wennejunk

        An angry populace of tax-paying citizens who fundamentally believe we have a right to the things we have sweated to earn

        AND

        Are willing to defend the same

        AND

        Are well-armed

  • kestrel

    “Any (rational) economic model… will predict infinite demand when the price approaches ?free.?

    That is why Medicare is bankrupting the country, and why both ObamaCare and RomneyCare, which both double down on Medicare’s methodology, will greatly accelerate our financial implosion.

    Medicare utilization is roughly 50% higher than private health-insurance utilization, even after adjusting for age and medical conditions. In other words, given two patients with similar health-care needs?one a Medicare beneficiary over age 65, the other an individual under 65 who has private health insurance?the senior will use nearly 50% more care.

    Several factors help cause this substantial disparity. First and foremost is the lack of effective cost sharing. When people are insulated from the cost of a desirable product or service, they use more.

    http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304760604576428300875828790.html?mod=WSJ_article_MoreIn_Opinion (emphasis mine)

    This is exactly what Paul Ryan has been saying until he’s blue in the face, and what healthcare advisers, from center-left to right (even Clinton’s), have been saying for 35 years. Medicare gives patients no incentive to make cost-effective medical decisions.

    Incidentally, this also opens the system to widespread fraud. For example, an elderly acquaintance doesn’t care that Medicare has “acknowledged” her “hip therapy” — which she’s never had, and she has no hip problems — because she paid nothing for it. If she was “cost sharing” — “sharing the cost” of it — she’d be yelling about being improperly charged for services. (As it is, she laughed it off, saying, “Oh, well”, even after I pointed out that something was amiss here).

    Frankly, this a big problem I have with Mitt Romney. No matter how terrific his business acumen, it’s worthless if he won’t use it. He should have told the Massachusetts legislature, “Economics 101 tells us that demand for a valuable commodity will increase as the cost approaches ‘free’.? And then VETOED RomneyCare unless and until it was based on a market-driven methodology that incentivizes the wise use of care. It could have been a model for the nation had Romney taken responsibility, instead of being a “permissive parent” essentially telling Massachusetts, “Okay, if you folks want the most expensive healthcare in the nation, long waits for doctors, health insurance companies going out of business and reducing competition and quality — if you want it, beloved Massachusettans, you got it.” No. VETO, Gov. Romney. Veto bad legislation.

    I had started a diary on this, from which I’ll just cut and paste some facts on RomneyCare now, because I’m out of time here. In short, RomneyCare is a disaster:

    Costs have soared. An average family of four in MA pays nearly $14,000 per year on healthcare, more than in any other state. Per capita healthcare spending is 27% higher than the national average, resulting in shortages of doctors and long waits (44 days to see a new primary care doctor, if you can find one), and an increase in people using ERs for routine care. Hospitals that treat many uninsured people (who still exist despite half the newly insured paying nothing toward their care) are facing bankruptcy because mandated reimbursements are lower than they were before RomneyCare, and are likely to go even lower as the government tries to artificially (forcefully) contain skyrocketing costs. — The failure of RomneyCare, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703625304575115691871093652.html

    Also:
    ?While the federal government has helped Massachusetts pay for its health-care law, there is no higher entity for the federal government to go to.?
    http://washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/op-eds/2011/09/lets-look-romneycare#ixzz1Y3MEbkg2

    I keep wondering why no one cleans Mitt’s clock with this. Maybe it’s the moderators’ fault. Newt, barge in and blast Mitt on this if no one else will. Thanks.

    • Repair_Man_Jack

      I’m stunned myself that it hasn’t ipso facto disqualifies Romney from any future higher office as a Republican. This is a process of two things.

      1) GOP establishment bias towards Romney.
      2) Rick Perry flat-out sucks right now as a Presidential candidate. His front-runner status just gave Mitt Romney two months of camoflague on the “ObamneyCare” and the “Mitt Warmney” issues that would have otherwise eviscerated his chances as a GOP contender.

      • Repair_Man_Jack

        The other candidates have failed to go after Romney. They either think Perry is a wounded member of the herd or believe Mitt has a lock on the “squish” vote. Either dynamic works well for Candidate Romney.

        • Jim Tomasik

          I’d love to see Romney get the beat down for ObamneyCare he deserves right in his own back yard.

          • Repair_Man_Jack

            But then again, you name the candidate and I’ll tell you why he needs the beatdown. I just don’t want Romney to win the nomination by default and then have Andrea Mitchell ask him all the hard questions on Barack obama’s behalf.

          • Jim Tomasik

            He ain’t studying Perry anymore.

            At least that is what he implies:

            http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/election-2012/post/herman-cain-debate-plan-hit-romney/2011/10/11/gIQANjhrcL_blog.html

            Sic ‘em Herman! No more mister nice guy! ;)

    • lineholder

      would probably jump significantly.

      • Common_Cents

        While others attack each other, falling into traps by media, Gingrich looks like the adult in the room.

        He has exp in health care policy reform area from his non profit.

        He is the most vetted candidate with old baggage and probably not any new surprises(who knows tho). With the economy in tatters, old baggage will weigh much much lower as people search for real solutions, straight talk, real change.

        He has shown the wisdom of knowing the media is biased and calling them out.

        He prob needs a couple candidates to drop and endorse to get a boost tho. Will be tough to do.