Michael Brown / Eric Garner - now the return of Occupy? - Granite Grok

Michael Brown / Eric Garner – now the return of Occupy?

  • Michael Brown – stole tobacco (taking the private property of another), physically intimidated the shopkeeper (assault)  and then got into that now infamous event with Darren Wilson (bad decisions have consequences)
  • Eric Garner – stole money (cheated The State out of tax revenues) by selling untaxed cigarettes

Consider the above and then this snippet from Liberty Unyielding on seeing the resulting street actions as Occupy Wall Street reborn:

The connection between big money and police interactions with blacks is elusive. But the New York protesters are not alone in the belief that capitalistic greed is a driver in the deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown. Raphael Warnock, pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, was a guest on Wolf Blitzer’s CNN show, where he spoke curiously of Wall Street bankers “gambling our money away.” Unless the reverend is mistaking Barack Obama for an investment banker, I have no idea what he’s talking about.

Right out of Occupy – anti-capitalism (see here).  Yet, look at the abridged version of the two deaths again.  One was simply greed – entitlement that what was someone else’s belonged to him and if you watched the security film shot from inside of the store, it was clear that Michael Brown believed in The Rule of the Strong man – the Rule of Law and respecting the private property of others be damned.  In the second, we saw an agent of The State (a policeman) cause the death of someone that refused to pay The State – we watched in real time the Libertarian mantra that The State (Government) is Force.  Thou Shalt Not Screw The Tax Collector.

We can argue both those points for days, but I scratch my head in rereading that snippet: “capitalistic greed is a driver in the deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown“.  There was no evidence of “capitalism” in the first – it was an outright theft that started off that sequence of events.  In the second, however, the greed is all on The State – and The State is a monopolistic entity – no pay, no freedom.  The State sets the market target (in this case, cigarettes) and the price (the tax) – there is NO CAPITALISM in this event.  Not even a glimmer of such – just the State demanding its tax.

Now, I think that Michael Brown earned his fate – at any time he could have made other decisions that would not have led to his end of life but in each of his, the choice was anti-law, criminal in fact.  Yet, we see the uplifting of him by the neo-Occupy protesters (again, reversal of traditional norms – stealing is bad; now it makes you famous).

Garner?  I do agree with others – selling loosies should not end in the maximum sentence that The State can met out – death (even if that was not the intent of the cop with the hold).  There is something very wrong with this even if it did start with a crime (selling without a license).  Yet, we have such a fine netting of criminal and administrative law surrounding us, this is an event that should concern us all.

Yet, all we hear from politicians is that “we” want them to get something done.  I do – but not what they think they mean.  At what point are we “over-lawed”?  This is not a grievance where anti-capitalism is the cure.  Yet, these neo-Occupiers are all in the mode the original was in – that EVERY thing that can solved has only one origin: more government.

The first case is a lack of self-responsibility and a lack of respect for others.  This latter one, I believe, is a problem too much Government.

Neither is a problem of “too much” capitalism.

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