Yes, it seems like I may be obsessing about this movement, but while there are some well meaning folks that are involved, there are also some folks that definitely have an agenda that does not mesh well (to put it kindly) with what the Founders had in mind.
For instance, there is one gentleman there that is, well, rather on the radical side over at Occupy NH who wrote a few things as to what he thought should be the future our our Government and Society. He truly seems to believe that in order to wrest society back from the evil 1% (emphasis on evil), he wants to remake everything:
1. First, work on building alternatives to the state and corporations. We’ve already built an experimental alternative to the State through occupy general assemblies. We should build our own markets/credit unions and maybe even our own currency system to decrease reliance on overpowering corporate oligarchies.
Of course, I just had to comment on it:
1a. Experiments are fine, but many ideas never get out of the experimental stage as they fail to scale. OWS has yet to prove that the GAs (General Assemblies, where everyone gets a say on absolutely everything that needs a decision) can scale using its current methodologies. And watching OWS-NYC try to move from early protest to a fuller commune, even with the GA technique, shows that it is much harder to govern (even just themselves) than to protest. Watching it attempt to govern has been painful to watch (altruistic, though, they might be) as the darker side of life walks in and occupies them (the professional homeless) and throwing monkey wrenches into their "order". The same arguments
have been heard before as they move to more of a commune before – freeloaders, those willing to not obey the rules, internecine wars over policies….it will be interesting to see how this experimental society does and if finally becomes just a bit of a mirror image of the society around it. And it will see if they rediscover Hayek’s "conceit of knowledge" as they continue.
1b. No visible result that has been seen, although Occupy Charlotte openly advocated for workers to rise up and just take over their workplaces and "run them democratically". Over the decades, I have watched communes come with similar philosophies to OWS, everyone is equal, all is shared – and extremely few have succeeded long term. Heck, entire countries were built on the idea that everyone is equal in all things, that all things are shared. Nice idea, never seems to go out of style – even when confronted that Socialism / Communism has never worked: the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc nations are a great example and sufficiently widespread that the notion of "we just haven’t had the right people in charge yet" is held not to be true (in fact, if people have to be in charge, it automatically disproves the notion).
Now, all that said, I’m interested to see how you would construct your markets such that they would be different than what exists on Main Street? What ARE your alternative versions of corporations – and using the true saying of "there is nothing new under the sun", what is it that you would NOT do in order to have a working model that scales upward?
Still waiting for an answer…..strange, some never like to be challenged, even if I wasn’t trying to be trying (just curious)….
