OCCUPY THE NANNY STATE

“Occupy Wall Street” has come to L.A. and San Diego. Fortunately, the small contingent of youngsters holding anti-capitalist signs at Ynez and Rancho California in Temecula last Saturday would have had a hard time occupying the nearby Pat & Oscar’s—a corporate enterprise that has filed for bankruptcy and shuttered two Carlsbad outlets thanks to an economy that’s been run for years by the protestors’ ideological soulmates in Sacramento.

After perusing the major “Occupy” web sites, especially “Occupy L.A.,” I feel safe in saying that most protestors would qualify for confinement within a hypothetical home for the criminally naïve. These folks generally display all the intellectual depth of those infatuated voters who elected our inexperienced, teleprompter-dependent president based on a vacuous “Hope and Change” platform.

Callow sign-holders calling for an end to capitalism are apparently unaware of the profound financial crises in Europe’s Grecian-formula economies or the utter lunacy of simply erasing all debts. These adolescent activists also seem oblivious to the implications of the four-trillion dollar deficit their transformational president has piled up in only three years—thanks in no small measure to socialist policies most non-taxpaying protestors apparently favor.

The thunderous, prolonged applause that last year greeted President Obama’s collegiate announcement that kids can stay on their parents’ insurance policies till age twenty-six typifies this entitlement mindset.

The following web-page comment by an “occupier” puts that applause into halting words: "We have been kind of screwed over by our government, which should be taking care of us and instead is taking advantage of us."

Patrick Henry and company must be spinning in their graves. Instead of protecting individual liberties and property, government for this and other protestors has become a lifelong nanny.

Unsurprisingly, many Democrats, labor unions, and public service workers that have sapped tax-paying Americans for fat pensions for decades have thrown in with these would-be waifs who prefer the multi-syllabic drivel of pseudo-professor Cornel West to any real knowledge about economics achieved by intellectual effort.

Reading a book or two by legitimate scholars like Thomas Sowell or Milton Friedman would be sufficient to enlighten all those who aren’t irredeemably committed to massaging their belly buttons. The reason Washington D.C. and corporations (like Solyndra) massage each other is because America’s government has become a giant 3.7 trillion-dollar slush fund. That’s why Wall Street’s Goldman-Sachs gave much more money to Obama than to McCain in 2008.

The best way to “get money out of politics” is to shrink government and let consumers, not Obama’s czars, determine winners and losers. But mobs, as opposed to most Tea Partiers, love mindless chants, power, simplistic schemes and especially imposing themselves on others.