This cartoon is probably more amusing than the OWS jokes I posted a couple of days ago.
Making fun of looters and moochers is good sport, of course, so the cartoon is appealing in that regard.
I’m not comfortable, though, with the imagery of a rich guy who looks like he is from Wall Street.
Give me a group of honest rich people, folks who have accumulated wealth by providing value to the world, and I will defend them to my last breath.
The crowd on Wall Street, though, sometimes likes to put its snout in the public trough.
That irks me for three reasons.
First, I’m strongly opposed to bailouts.
Second, I viscerally despise government activities that redistribute from the poor to the rich.
Third, I loathe crony capitalism that gives well-connected rich people an advantage in the marketplace.
But the cartoon is funny, so let’s not make the perfect the enemy of the good. Enjoy and share.
[…] I wonder if the Occupy Wall Street crowd would even recognize that it’s a joke rather than […]
[…] I wonder if the Occupy Wall Street crowd would even recognize that it’s a joke rather than […]
[…] on redistributionism, including this Halloween classic, this Elizabeth Warren takedown, this mockery of the Occupy Wall Street nitwits, and this caricature of Obama’s class […]
[…] humor, particularly when it exposes absurdity. This is why I shared all these jokes (here, here, here, here, here, and here) about the Occupy Wall Street […]
“From the poor to the rich”?????
How in Hell do you steal from somebody who has nothing? For that matter, _WHAT_ can you steal from a person who has nothing?
Any redistribution that takes from _ANYBODY_ to give to _ANYBODY ELSE_ is wrong!
And why don’t they understand that the real thieves are the government and the union bosses and the fat, greasy, sweaty hollywood socialists like Michael Moore and Jeaneane(sp) Garafolo(sp)?
Oprah gives away 300 cars. How about 30,000 Thanksgiving dinners?
Ach, I rant.
[…] fun of the OccupyWallStreet protesters on many occasions (see here, here, here, here, here, and here), but this column shows that big business oftentimes does engage in corrupt deals with the […]
[…] other examples of OWS humor, see here, here, and here. LD_AddCustomAttr("AdOpt", "1"); LD_AddCustomAttr("Origin", "other"); […]
[…] more OWS humor, see here, here, and here. LD_AddCustomAttr("AdOpt", "1"); LD_AddCustomAttr("Origin", "other"); […]
[…] posted a couple of cartoons (here and here) about Occupy Wall Street, so now it’s time for a […]
Dan, concerning these “Occupy Wall Streeters” demanding the
allowance of their defaulting on their consumer debt through a repudiation of
consumer debt (perhaps through coercive measures taken by the government):
Aren’t these the very same people who refused to let the government default on its debt (that was owed to them in the form of Social Security, Medicare, and other welfare programs) during the raising of the debt ceiling crisis earlier
this year, yet now demand that they be allowed to default on their consumer
debt? So let me get this straight, when it’s people owing you other things, you
demand it to be paid NOW, yet when you owe others a debt, you demand mercy and forgiveness/cancelation of that debt? When the government owes them something or when they feel the government owes them something, they demand it be paid IMMEDIATELY (“When do we want it? NOW!”), yet they want their own consumer debts that they owe to others to be defaulted on and repudiated. What selfish, hypocritical, illogical ideas!
Perhaps these Wall Street occupiers and the “Liberal Democrats/Progressives” who support them and their demands for consumer debt repudiation should reread the Parable of the Unrighteous Servant found in St. Matthew 18 in the New Testament.
One of the things I loved about some of the Occupy Wall Street hippies is the demand they be forgiven their student loans. You should appreciate the irony here Dan.
1. Government gives money to Wall Street.
2. Corporations act as you’d expect and take advantage of it for profit.
3. Anti-capitalists rage at Wall Street.
and
1. Government gives money to education.
2. Colleges act as you’d expect and take advantage of it for profit.
3. Anti-capitalists rage … at Wall Street.
Why sleep on the street when you don’t even have to leave the comfort of your own campus to protest the exact same kind of cronyism?
I mean if they really believe the onus is on the people at stage 2 of this process to refrain from “greed”.
Yesterday, I actually went to OWS to talk to them in person. I found many thoughtful people. They were all seemingly willing to engage in discussion with me and nobody (except for one cop) was rude to me. In fact we ended up finding much common ground and those who knew about libertarianism seemed to have respect for it. I came away encouraged.
[…] Some good humor from two of my favorite blogs; here and here. […]
“We, the lower and middle-class people of the western world have a standard of living that is 6x the world average. But lately, as a sea of humanity in the emerging world is on their way to catching up with us — and as we adopt the very failed policies of collective economic management the emerging world is rejecting – our productivity advantage has dropped to only 4x. So 4x productivity and 6x prosperity. Predictably, the one billion people of the West are loosing their competitive advantage against the remaining five billion of this earth. So we, the one billion people of The West, are demanding that the 2x shortfall between our productivity and standard of living, be made up through redistribution. That (for sure!) will not only arrest the sliding competitiveness of The West but will surely reverse it… There is Hope. All you have to do is embrace the Change.”
This is the song the West is singing on its way to decline – same song — sang in a few different variations by delusional useful idiot naives across the Western Hemisphere.
The seemingly disparate upheavals that the Western world is going through: bubbles, crises, debt etc., are simply different facets of a Western world that is loosing its fundamental competitiveness and prosperity advantage against a much larger rising humanity of once oppressed people.
The three billion once oppressed people who have finally woken up to some, albeit limited, economic freedom have no time or desire to wait and find out how the Western World’s experimentation with socialism will turn out. In economic terms they will simply take no prisoners. Especially amongst the once snobbish Westerners who took their wealth for granted and thought it would last forever no matter how much ex third world mandatory collectivism they adopted.
The West has simply lost its way, so it’s economic crisis stems from its cultural crisis. Western voters, comfortable in their success, stopped fostering the very individualism that enabled the West to rise to the top of human prosperity – while at the same time three billion people of the once oppressed world took up reforms toward more individualism. Faced with the challenge of a rising emerging sea of humanity, the West is adopting the very collectivism rejected by its once failed competitors, It is thus reacting in textbook suicidal fashion. It’s too late to arrest the fall, much less reverse it. The West is now living the twilight of its once taken for granted dominance, their democracies in the declining embrace spiral of HopeNChange and Mitchell’s-Law.
Attempting to stop voters from pressing the redistribution button at the polls is like trying to convince alcoholics to give up the bottle. Everyone knows the final outcome, but quitting is just so hard to do, one more drink and then I’ll stop. Americans are the latest western culture to take up drinking. The writing is on the wall… but it is now frightened westerners staring at the wall.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_writing_on_the_wall
Keep hoping. Redistribution and Central Planning are the guiding lights to a new era of superior Western prosperity… and watch out for those unicorns flying in to save us any time now…
You know nothing of these people. If you did you wouldn’t say such asinine things.
Dan, have you seen this one? 🙂