The Occupy movement provided a valuable service to our national debate. With 1 word, we can now imply a whole world of economic reality, perception, and opinion. I want to say that I don’t just feel for the unemployed masses now demonstrating their ire against the rich, but I also think they make a valuable point with a misguided interpretation.

The fact that the world has changed is so obvious as to be cliche. Since the first factory started up, serving as a system for churning out products people needed, wealth has been migrating from those without wealth creation systems to those with them. The ‘means of production’ is not a magic box that prints money and costs a million buck to obtain, but rather a system for meeting the needs of the market, for which the inputs are labor (employees) and capital (tools, machines, generally stuff bought with money). For a long time, the advantage of capital over labor was the strength it could grant to the superior mental power of the employee. What happens when that isn’t true?

The statistics thrown around Occupy mostly seem to stem from a key bit about the top 1% owning 40% of the world’s wealth. The first source I can find for this seems to be a report from the World Institute for Development Economics Research published in 2007 by Davies, Sandström, Shorrocks, and Wolff. That report also indicates that as of 2001, the top 10% of families in the US owned nearly 70% of the wealth in the US. The purpose of the report was to establish what the facts were regarding worldwide wealth distribution. There is a similar though somewhat less scary story about income in the US. According the US Census, the top 8% by income of households earn 28.5% of the nations income. The bad news is that not only is this the case, and that it has been getting worse over time; but that I believe it is neither possible nor a good idea to try to stop it.

Topio playing Ping Pong at the International Robot Exhibition of 2009

Over the last 30 years, information focused capital (read ‘computers’) has grown from curiosity, through mainstream, to mindbogglingly pervasive. With an economy based on systems, improving the system means either improving the labor, or the capital. Priests and educators have been trying to improve people for millennia with mixed results in the short term. Capital on the other hand, can be reprogrammed, replaced, redesigned, reinvested, etc.

For most of the electronics components I buy (capital investment) the first thing I do is find out if there is a software update I can apply, as that will usually improve the functionality of the device. Software updates to existing hardware have been known to improve battery life, system speed, and general useability, all by changing the way the same hardware is used. The device is designed by a team of very smart engineers, many of whom are in the top 10% income earners. The software that powers it is written by also smart programmers, many of whom are also in the top 10% income earners. The device is finally produced in factories owned by the top 1% and sold to the top 80% for $X. Then, while the 80% are using it for the next year, the engineers are busy designing a new version that can do 20% more and will cost slightly less; and the programmers are writing better updates to use the device.

The cumulative effect of that type of capital improvement lifecycle, is that capital can do an increasingly large portion of the productive system. $1 of capital ends up being able to do more work than $1 of labor. I’ll ask you to now change your perspective from that of an employee to that of an investor. Which would you rather be selling, labor or capital? If the value of capital is improving every year, and the value of labor is only improving at a much slower pace, then as an investor, wouldn’t you rather be selling capital.

Humans mostly are not born with much capital, we are all born with some amount of labor. We can think, we can do work, and since we all have labor to sell, we have to choose what we want to do to improve the quality of that labor. If we make our labor the type that competes with machines, then expect that you’ll get paid a lot less for it over time. If you make your labor the type that doesn’t compete with machines, then you’ll enjoy a decent wage for as long as it takes to build a machine smart enough to do what you do. In the meantime, save as much as you can, and invest it carefully. Build up your capital, because not long from now, it will be worth more than you are.

In the absence of any stated demands by the occupiers, many have surmised that since it is a demonstration, the best way to pacify the crowd would be some kind of political change that addressed the disparity between the rich and poor. However, redistributive programs like higher taxes on the rich, and better services to the poor are just examples of taking buckets of water from the lake at the bottom of a waterfall and putting them back into the river at the top. The structure of our economy is moving things in 1 direction and compensating for that tide will be logistically daunting.  Probably the only thing government can do that would make any difference at all for the 99% would be job training programs for the bottom 25%.

No amount of job training will address the structural problems that come from a political system where the top 1% can exercise adequate control over the law to protect themselves from competition. This is one area where I am truly optimistic. I’m of the opinion that the same information technology that will make the human body obsolete will also put more information in the hands of voters in than has ever been possible before. What we lose in that is a certain degree of reliability. Social networking can spread lies just as fast as the truth, the biggest advantage this brings to the 99% is the fact that it is more difficult to control with money than the mass media is. The lies will be rather equally distributed, and the truth can be announced through credible channels and distributed just as quickly as the lies.

I have recently started changing my life around this concept. I believe that the most rewarding area of work is going to be in the that field of making capital do more, ie. programming. If I am one of those who can make the machines more powerful, then making a machine that can do my job for me won’t be a threat, but a profound accomplishment.

You can look at the world ahead 2 ways. It can be a scary world where the machines put all the humans out of work and only the super-rich who own them get any value out of life, or it can be a dynamic world where ideas and creativity are the only problems worth burdening the human mind. Don’t occupy Wall Street, occupy your mind with solutions to the very real problems in the world.

Money is NOT wealth. Many things that increase wealth can be bought with money. Even the wealth of options that are available to somebody with lots of money can be highly valued in and of itself, but even then, it is the opportunity, not the money, that is valued. Wealth is time spent doing things you enjoy with people you love, like surfing, or walking, or simply talking. But money can buy many tools that make these actions easier to do, or more enjoyable while doing them.

I recently declared that ‘My preference is to avoid a government driven economy even if it were to lead to greater overall wealth, which I still do not believe is accurate.’ This was in response to a James Galbraith interview by Ezra Klein stating that there is nothing to fear from large government deficits. (to those who may find the argument convincing, I’d like to point to the role inflation plays in Galbraith’s analysis)

If the government were to decide that X is better for the wealth of the country than Y, but X is worse for your wealth, then the amount of money taken from you to accomplish X should be minimized to afford you the option of securing Y for yourself. (that’s very poorly written, I’ll have to revise it later, but that’s how my brain is working right now.)

Wealth is good, but only insofar is it is created by Freedom and Law. Freedom is the good, wealth is the result, hard work and vision under law is the means.

I call Freedom the good because life is not just a finite series of events during which one enjoys either luxury or a lack thereof. Life is not even a roller coaster of hills and turns that you have no control over. Life is a jungle of challenges and opportunities that can pop up and disappear in the blink of an eye. The choices you make affect your life and the lives all around you.

Money plays a key role in this because money provides access to an array of opportunities that are not afforded to less endowed individuals. More importantly, money tends to flow to those who provide value to others while it flows away from those who detract from that value. Government distorts that flow though when it redirects money to flow for political purposes.

“Government is law – law which allows society to grow and flourish. Its terms and specific properties derive from an anterior social reality, not the other way around. It is a set of “ground rules” or agreed upon procedures, found in the course of their history to be reasonable and conducive to the general happiness or those whom it binds. Even the meaning of the word “liberty” is restricted by these rules.” – Mel E. Bradford

When Kant defined “rights” he was basically saying, “There are no divine rights”. I challenge you to find one in The Bible (or any other religious book). All rights are political in nature and not abstract, divine, or inalienable. Jefferson was one of our country’s greatest thinkers, but his words in the Declaration of Independence were dangerously wrong. If we have the divine right to “life” why do we die? If we have a divine right to liberty, why did God allow his “chosen people” to be dragged off into slavery? Remember, the word “inalienable” means “can not be taken away for any reason”. I think that it’s “self-evident” that Jefferson was wrong.

Rights come from political institutions and are only valid for as long as the political institution survives. An example of the real right is the “right to drive an automobile”. The government says that if you obey the traffic laws, pass a test to show your ability to drive correctly, and pay your car taxes it will extend to you the “right to drive a car”. If you fail to do any of those three things that “right” is taken away from you. It even can be extended to economics. If I agree to give the guy at the counter $7.00 at Burger King, he extends to me the “right” to eat his double meat whopper with cheese, fires, and a coke.

The problem today is that “abortion, homosexuality, and other debaucheries” actually are rights in this country today. They are legally agreed upon contracts between the citizens and the government through legal elections and appointments. If you look carefully at what Bradford is saying he’s saying that those rights are not founded in history or in long held social mores. They are in fact “innovations” that contradict the long standing position of this culture (which was founded on Protestant values that have been held by Northern Europeans for over 500 years). That is why the country is collapsing. With the election of Obama and the liberal democrats, we have thrown gasoline on the fire.

There are three possible consequences to this. First, Obama and the liberals continue to rule for an extended period of time. That will result in the complete fall of this country. The liberal way just doesn’t work. You can’t murder the tax base and work force at a rate of 1.5 million a year and survive very long. You can’t spend future generation’s prosperity into the fifth or sixth future generation without wrecking the economy to the extent that it will take 100s of years to recover. These people are a complete fraud. They parade around with the “peace and love and diversity” motto tattooed on their chest, but in reality they are more prolific mass murderers than Hitler, Stalin, and Mao combined.

The second alternative is the way of the fundamentalist Christians. These people are not really Christians, they’re Pharisees. They worship the rules. Unfortunately, their way does work. It’s only cost is freedom. Frankly, I would much rather have Obama making the laws than Eric Farel.

The last alternative is the way of the founders. Have a set of laws that represent the collective history of our culture. That will never happen. How many people do you know who really understand what freedom really is? Looking at the polls from the latest election, I’d say about three percent of the population. Sadly, that means that the third option has no chance. My best guess is that Obama is the final heartbeat of the left, and the hard right will take over for good. This won’t happen with an election. The left owns the media, the entertainment industry, the courts, the public schools, and the universities. None of those institutions answer to the voters. The change will occur violently, and freedom and liberty will be the final victim.

Now reread the original statement by Bradford. It is in keeping with the views of Burke, Kirk, Weaver, and Adams.