Occupy Wall Street

The new Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement is sprung from exactly the same anger impulse as the Tea Party.  Both movements express the overarching feeling that the government is not working for the citizenry or the common good of America.  As the modern American plutocracy solidifies there is an odd brazenness about this governmental apathy (broken only briefly during the election cycle). 

While the Tea Party comes at this situation from a more conservative (small government) position the new Occupy Wall Street movement engages the problem from a more (pro-Government) progressive angle.  The underlying root of this problem is clearly the corrupting marriage of big business and big government, but the OWS participants do not grasp that the government is (at least) half of the problem.  The inequity that they rail against is not the isolated product of corporate greed but those corporations and giant Wall Street investment firms working in harmony with a big and intrusive government.   Politicians need massive amounts of money to run for office and the plutocrats who run these big businesses provide those funds and thus gain the legislative influence (you had a rather stark example of this yesterday as Barney Frank voiced his sympathy with the OWS movement as he headed out to a major fund raising dinner in New York at the house of Charles Myers, a banker at Evercore Partners).

The root of this problem is money; campaign reform is not going to happen, neither major party wants it, and the current Supreme Court is simply not going to allow it so the only solution is a smaller government.  You cannot fix this problem thru additional government intervention but only thru the removal of government from both the business and the personal life of its citizens, i.e. a libertarian model.  It is only thru the elimination of points of contact between business and government that you might start to ameliorate our current mess, if there are less points of contact than there is less opportunity for the corrupting complicity between big business and big government.