Our kids are putting on warpaint and occupying everything except public restrooms. Good for them. May they speed the change we all need. We seem to have a hard time agreeing on what the change ought to be, though.
I can't tell you what they think it's about, because they prefer hand signals to political manifestos. But I can tell you what it should be about: fences.
One could read news stories about the Occupants and conclude that they categorically hate capitalism, and indeed I'm sure that many of them do … while they snuggle in their North Face tents and download podcasts of the revolution on their iDevices, all made possible by the miracle of capitalism and corporate America.
These aren't stupid people. They know the irony. And they know that capitalism is the worst economic system in the world, except for all the others.
Capitalism is the rattlesnake in the garden. In the wild, it lives to kill. You cannot make pet of it. It will kill you.
At the same time, there is no more efficient way of ridding your garden of gophers, rabbits, moles and rats, so you and the snake can grow fat and happy. If only you could keep it fenced in the garden, focused on killing rodents, and out of the house, where it will bite your baby.
You can't do this with snakes, but, good news, you can do it with banks, stock exchanges, corporations and all the other capitalist animals we live with and thrive upon. We used to know this, but we seem to have lost our way.
Unregulated, capitalism will do what it is programmed to do: turn resources into money, ruthlessly and efficiently. And it is indeed the most efficient way in history to put food on our table, shiny cars in the driveway, big screen TVs on the wall and interesting stuff to watch when we're done working for the day.
If money were all there is to health and happiness, capitalism would always be a benign and useful process. But what the Occupants are saying is that we aren't made of money. We are human beings that need healthy food, shelter, clean air and water to thrive. For capitalism, those things are byproducts; the bait that's used to extract money from us and recycle into more capital. And the ruthless efficiency of the process can have unintended consequences, like cancer. Poisoned air and water. Climate damage. Toxic mortgages.
Regulations are the fence we use to keep the process focused on protecting our health and welfare, instead of preying upon us. They put real price tags on activities like gas and oil drilling, so that when the shit happens, we can afford to clean it up. They keep activities like power generation from fouling the air and costing the rest of us billions in extra health care. And they keep banks from predatory activities like gambling with our pensions and loan sharking our home mortgages.
A few decades ago, the folks who had the most to gain from unfettered capitalism took down the fences. They rolled back the regulations that kept banks and investment firms from preying on a market of unsuspecting consumers. They made a fortune. And then you know what happened.
There are folks who want to blame consumers for letting themselves get bitten. Fair enough, but the problem is, if these folks don't recover, we all take the hit. Our jobs disappear, our homes lose value, our cities decline. We can't build a future without a healthy consumer class.
Don't blame them. And don't blame the system.
Fix it.
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