DOWN WITH MERITOCRACY

October 24, 2011: Recently Newsweek reported that the “Wall Street Occupiers” were just regular folks like you and me who simply have had enough of our unfair economic system, and they went on to say “What’s wrong with that? But surveys taken of the New York “Occupy Wall Street” gang reflected that just 15% of them are jobless, and although most voted for Barack Obama in 2008, only 44% approve of the job the President is doing. 52% percent have participated in political demonstrations before, and 31 % say they would support violence to advance their agenda.

But what is their agenda? Newsweek says: “the protestors have a distinct ideology and are bound by a deep commitment to radical left wing policies. They are comprised by an unrepresentative segment of the electorate that believes in the radical redistribution of wealth”. Throughout history there have been segments of every society that did not want to have to compete in the marketplace. Instead of admiration of achievement or inspiration to do better they believe that there should be a governor regulating the accumulation of wealth or tax policy that transfers wealth from the successful to those who for one reason or the other have less. The claim is that “It is only fair”.

But America was founded on the principal of free choice and that anyone could succeed if they worked hard and did well in their job and were patient regarding recognition by others. As a popular pundit said in his column recently,” America is a Meritocracy” where those who practice hard work, self-improvement and diligence will be rewarded and those that do not will fail. The egalitarian believes this to be unfair and this attitude is what drives their hatred of capitalism that we are seeing in some sectors of America. During the past century, the American people, strongly influenced by social media including films, television, radio and Broadway authors, became increasingly conditioned (educated?) to the fairness and propriety of helping the disadvantaged. And that was good, but somewhere along the way, primarily because of individuals or groups seeking political advantage, it became more and more common among the population to believe that achievement was bad. If you were successful in a business or in a commercial way you must be greedy. The only way you could have accumulated a lot of money was by disadvantageous acts against the poor or those with less skill. Some people began to voice opinions that survival of the fittest is unfair simply because there are some who are unfit. If you survive therefore you must do it over the bodies of the unfit. Their knowledge of how the Meritocracy generates the resources to accommodate or fund the needs of the poor or disadvantaged has become lost in the uproar over how much tax the wealthy pay.

The Occupy Wall Street crowd believes the accumulation of wealth by individuals is immoral if there is poverty among society. They want to have a government bureaucracy determine what people are allowed to do and when and where they can do it. This is not just because of the need to provide for the public safety but more so because they believe it is a government’s responsibility to even out their perceptions of excesses in wealth accumulating to one person, family or group of persons such as a corporation.

It would be useful for these unwashed anti-capitalists camping on the streets in front of legitimate businesses to do some research or pick up a book or read a good unbiased newspaper so as to see what happens to “Command Economies”. If they discovered anything it would be that one of the 20th century’s largest socialistic societies, Russia, governed under a communist manifesto imploded under the weight of their inefficient bureaucracies. They would learn of China’s transition from Communism to a quasi-socialistic market based economy. They would learn about the real poverty resulting from the central controlled economies upon citizens in Cuba, Zambia or North Korea. Any objective analysis would demonstrate to them the negative consequences when a government controls the allocation of capital rather than the free market, when a government operates on the principal that all property is public and individual achievement is declared to be indicative of greed. They would also learn that if we allow this radical movement to lead us into making the mistake of destroying or even just impairing the potential of our best institutions and most creative individuals, then we are lost.

One Man’s Opinion—Bud Brewer