As a TEA Party person, it should be clear that I have been watching the Occupy Wall Street movement but lately, a lot of it from outside of NH.  I haven’t been to one of their rallies since doing the videos a few weeks ago, but have been observing and commenting over at Occupy NH – a forum for those interested in debating the issues that are of importance to them.  There are a few Libertarians that are involved, which has given it a flair that is most unlike what you are seeing in the TV and online news as they decided to, given the call to be "inclusive", put in their two cents on individual freedom.

Not being able to help myself, I have, er, made a few comments from time to time to make sure that the TEA Party principles are heard (under the monniker of ConservativeTEAParty but letting people know who I really am).  After all, if I cannot win in the arena of ideas, I deserve to lose.

Here are a couple of posts from the more "committed" NH Occupiers:

• There is a tendency to have govt be in charge, and the more the better: In a global society with no borders, we will need a world bank and a world governing organization. Countries (borders) are things we can do without. The people of the whole world are facing the same problems.

It is nice to see that since Obama has endorsed this movement that they think just like he does – a Post-America America.  Another overriding them is that "the 1%" (according to OWSers, these are those individuals that control the 42% of the wealth in America) have illegally and illegitimately from the rest of us "the 99%".

• Definitely agreed. I believe the 1% are using the state as a tool to steal from the everyone else. We must take those resources they have plundered back! However, taxation is not the mechanism to do it. Taxation simply doesn’t go far enough, and the rich are always able to avoid paying those taxes by forming Cayman Island/Swiss bank accounts and what not…

And indeed, much of this movement is centered around these two main themes – equality via Government, and taking from others they believe what is justifiably theirs.  One made a comment on equality:

I’m not an economist by any means, but I believe workers have the right to be paid decent and livable wages. I’m all for income equality.

So, I decided to challenge him:

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One of the just whacked out things that a President can say is that the Constitution (to which he swears an oath to upon ascending to the Office of President) is wrong. However,  as Obama has said:(in defense of the antithesis of what is actually in the Constitution – his support for "positive rights"):

But, the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth, and of more basic issues such as political and economic justice in society. To that extent, as radical as I think people try to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn’t that radical. It didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution, at least as its been interpreted and Warren Court interpreted in the same way, that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties. Says what the states can’t do to you. Says what the Federal government can’t do to you, but doesn’t say what the Federal government or State government must do on your behalf, and that hasn’t shifted and one of the, I think, tragedies of the civil rights movement was, um, because the civil rights movement became so court focused I think there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalition of powers through which you bring about redistributive change. In some ways we still suffer from that.”

Bruce Walker over at American Thinker put it well:

How can liberty be anything other than negative?  Liberty is the absence of external control.  Only in our age of collective thinking and untidy language could such a thing as "positive liberty" be conceived.  The state power to coerce is not liberty.

One of the forum members at Occupy NH had this to say:

Unfortunately our constitutional rights are based on the concept of negative liberty and thus the ideal is "equality of opportunity – not results",

My response?

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