Hostile Takeover: Resisting Centralized Government's Stranglehold on America (11 page)

The answer, it turns out, was no. But why not? What was the disconnect between freedom-loving Tea Partiers and Wall Street–hating Occupiers?

The answer came from economist and Nobel laureate Vernon Smith, who was delivering the keynote lecture at the same Mises seminar, on Adam Smith’s
The Theory of Moral Sentiments
. His address focused on the question “How do social norms emerge spontaneously?” As I listened to a brilliant talk, I was answering a very different question in my mind: What is the difference between OWS and the Tea Party?

Both Smiths, Adam and Vernon, argue that individual freedoms and individual property rights are the foundations of moral behavior—the values that bind a community. Individuals, with full ownership of their life, liberty, and property, judge themselves and care about the positive judgments of others. This accountability is the moral basis that binds a community, allows for cooperation, and enables human prosperity.

Adam Smith said it this way: “The most sacred laws of justice, therefore, those whose violation seems to call loudest for vengeance and punishment, are the laws which guard the life and person of our neighbour; the next are those which guard his property and possessions; and last of all come those which guard what . . . is due to him from the promises of others.”
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Most Tea Partiers have not likely read all 546 pages of
The Theory of Moral Sentiments,
but have nonetheless inherited this foundational insight genetically from America’s Founding Fathers, who themselves cribbed it from Scottish Enlightenment thinkers like Adam Smith.

We can boil it down to this: Don’t hurt other people and don’t take their stuff.

From this “sacred law” comes grassroots activists’ righteous indignation toward bailouts of the irresponsible, and deficit spending on special-interest earmarks. Both reward bad behavior and are paid for with other people’s stuff. We oppose other government intrusions in our lives, such as the Obamacare mandate that every American must buy health insurance that will decide, without our input, which treatments we may or may not be allowed. We oppose government forcing the responsible to subsidize the irresponsible, because these policies hurt other people and take their stuff.

DOMESTIC TERRORISTS

W
HEN MORE THAN 1 MILLION CITIZENS PETITIONED THEIR GOVERNMENT
for a redress of grievances at the September 12, 2009, Taxpayer March on Washington, our critics hoped that the overwhelming mass of humanity would devolve into chaos. Based on historical experiences with radical leftists, it should have. People still recall the violent “Battle in Seattle” in 1999, the infamous protest against the World Trade Organization that resulted in much violence and damage to both the city and private property. Grassroots protesting before the emergence of the Tea Party—dominated by leftist nihilists, socialists, progressives, and the like—usually devolved into incivility or worse, so if you were not really paying attention to what was happening, you could reasonably have expected more of the same.

Professional leftists, acolytes of Alinsky, eagerly attacked our community early on, trying to define us as angry and violent, a fringe element that was dangerous to America. My favorite smear came from David Axelrod, now chief campaign adviser to President Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign. In an April 2009 interview, right after an estimated 800-plus Tax Day Tea Parties demonstrated the growing power of this fledgling movement for fiscal responsibility, Axelrod was interviewed about the phenomenon by Bob Schieffer on
Face the Nation.
Speaking then as a senior White House adviser, he suggested that “there is always an element of disaffection that can mutate into something that’s unhealthy.” Was the Tea Party protesting “unhealthy”? Schieffer asked. “This is a country where we value our liberties and our ability to express ourselves,” Axelrod responded, “and so far these are expressions.”
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This shockingly conditional endorsement of our civil liberties and the right to free speech was particularly disturbing coming straight from a White House official. Was Axelrod hedging his bets on the future wisdom of the Bill of Rights, taking a wait-and-see attitude?

Outside the West Wing of the White House, the accusations from Team Obama were even more unhinged. Organizing for America, which was once the grassroots arm of the 2008 Obama presidential campaign, then called Organizing for Obama, put out this beauty on the eve of the September 12, 2009, March on Washington: a national call to action to its members to “fight back against our own Right-Wing Domestic Terrorists who are subverting the American Democratic Process.”
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The “domestic terrorist” motif, quickly pulled down from the OFA website, had a second life when top Democratic legislators and Vice President Joe Biden used it again to describe Tea Party opposition to increasing the national debt ceiling in the summer of 2011.

As
Politico
reported:

Vice President Joe Biden joined House Democrats in lashing Tea Party Republicans Monday, accusing them of having “acted like terrorists” in the fight over raising the nation’s debt limit, according to several sources in the room.

Biden was agreeing with a line of argument made by Rep. Mike Doyle (D-Pa.) at a two-hour, closed-door Democratic Caucus meeting.

“We have negotiated with terrorists,” an angry Doyle said, according to sources in the room. “This small group of terrorists have made it impossible to spend any money.”

Biden, driven by his Democratic allies’ misgivings about the debt-limit deal, responded: “They have acted like terrorists.”
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How disappointed they all must have been that September morning in 2009, as the largest gathering of limited-government activists in history converged on the Capitol steps. It should have been chaos. As primary organizers who had supplied the stage, security fencing, and other safety and crowd control measures required by the permits, all of us at FreedomWorks were caught totally off guard. So were the National Park Service and Capitol police, who clearly had not anticipated such a massive crowd. And yet, despite it all, there was no pushing, no shoving. There were no fights. No one got arrested. We said “excuse me” as we waded through shoulder-to-shoulder crowds. We said “thank you” when someone we had never met and would likely never see again helped us reach the stage in time to speak. We waited in hopelessly long lines for too few portable toilets. We picked up our trash and we left both public spaces and private property exactly as we found them. If it was chaotic, it was the most beautiful chaos I have ever seen in my life.

Needless to say, there were no videos of public pooping, on police cars or otherwise, as we later had the misfortune of seeing at OWS. We didn’t realize this as a great community accomplishment at the time.

Individualism, personal responsibility, and respect for property form the operating philosophy that allows for peaceful order to emerge where violence and chaos might otherwise explode. No one told us to do these things; we just believe that you shouldn’t hurt other people and you shouldn’t take their stuff.

THIS UNCHECKED AGGRESSION WILL NOT STAND

O
CCUPY
W
ALL
S
TREET ACTIVISTS, IN SPITE OF THE FACT THAT THEIR
ranks were a small fraction of the size of the Tea Party community, struggled to maintain basic civility, let alone peaceful cooperation in their tent cities. My early hopes quickly evaporated as I watched the initial protests quickly devolve into ugliness. The term
occupy
itself seems to imply a zero-sum gain, an act of taking, by conquest, someone else’s property.
It’s unchecked aggression.
Like when Saddam Hussein
occupied
Kuwait.

The attitude was illustrated even at OWS’s home base in and around Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan, which is private property in the heart of New York City’s financial district. From the very beginning, there were reports of stealing, property damage both in the park and at small businesses surrounding it, and arrests, often of protesters who had provoked conflict with the police.

Local Panini & Co. owner Stacey Tzortzatos said that she “had a lot of damage from the protesters. . . . I’ve had to put a $200 lock on my bathroom because they come in here and try to bathe. The sink fell down to the ground, cracked open, pulled the plumbing out of the wall and caused a flood. It’s a no-win situation.” Another nearby businessman has had similar problems: “They want to use the toilet, the phones, we give them free water and free ice,” says the frustrated restaurateur. “They sit here and don’t buy anything, but they recharge their phone batteries with our plugs, and I tell them, ‘Hey, if you guys are going to come, I need to do some business here. We are suffering, too!’ And then they start with their own words, going against you.”
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Another small group of Washington, D.C., OWS activists inexplicably tried to force their way into the National Air and Space Museum. According to the
Washington Post
: “The demonstrators carried large signs and other items not allowed inside the museum. . . . When a security guard told them they could not enter, demonstrators pushed the guard outside and up against a wall.”
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Pepper spray came out, the police were called, and one person was arrested.

The problems have only escalated since the beginning. According to a list compiled by blogger John Nolte, more than 400 Occupiers had been arrested by the end of December 2011.
14
An
Associated Press
report added up the damage and found that the first two months of OWS resulted in $13 million in damages.
15

Things have gone far worse at OWS events across Europe. In Rome, for instance, one OWS protest quickly devolved into a full-on riot, with protesters smashing shop and bank windows and torching cars. “Clad in black with their faces covered,” the Associated Press reported, “protesters threw rocks, bottles and incendiary devices at banks and Rome police in riot gear. Some protesters had clubs, others had hammers. They destroyed bank ATMs, set trash bins on fire and assaulted at least two news crews from Sky Italia.”
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Can you imagine a Tea Partier ever behaving in such a way? The 9/12 Taxpayer March on Washington had at least ten times as many attendees as anticipated, and yet all day I saw activists shaking hands with various law enforcement staff and thanking them for their help in a logistically confused gathering.

A woman named Latoya, who was working at a local Chicago TV studio where I was doing an interview about the differences between the Tea Party and OWS, described it this way: “The difference between the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street is the difference between Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. Malcolm X said: ‘By any means necessary.’”
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She’s right. In fact, the 9/12 March consciously channeled the iconic 1963 march, inspired by MLK’s purposefully nonviolent model for social change. The Boston Tea Party, once lionized by radical leftists as the historical model for “direct action,” was always more MLK than Malcolm X. The original Tea Party protest was a carefully orchestrated event designed to galvanize colonial opinion in favor of American independence. Sam Adams trained protesters to ensure that no one was hurt, and that only East India Company tea, protected by the British government’s monopoly status, was destroyed. As far as I can determine, no dodgy Bank of America mortgage-backed securities, protected by the U.S. Treasury Department with your hard-earned tax dollars, were burned in effigy at Zuccotti Park. But windows have been smashed in Oakland, California, by out-of-control Occupiers.

Tactical nonviolence is smart strategy, as everyone from Dr. King to Mahatma Gandhi has demonstrated in practice. But for modern Tea Partiers, it is really just a practical outgrowth of the values that define our community’s ethos. No one could possibly have trained more than a million marchers in the tactics of nonviolence, as was done by civil rights activists before the Greensboro, North Carolina, Woolworth’s sit-in. The spontaneous community of Tea Partiers that emerged in Washington, D.C., on 9/12/09 simply believed, to a person, that you don’t hurt other people and you don’t take their stuff.

And that’s where the Occupiers ultimately fell short. Stuff was taken. People were hurt.

SPENDING MONEY YOU DON’T HAVE

P
ART OF THE PROBLEM SEEMS TO HAVE BEEN THE
O
CCUPIERS’ INABILITY
to identify a unifying sense of purpose in their uprising. When you look for a coherent set of policy goals in the Occupy Wall Street crowd, you discover a very disparate set of demands coming from various factions of the “social justice” coalition, all competing with one another for a bigger share of the pie and a larger take of somebody else’s stuff. To be sure, some of the original protesters were real people with righteous anger at the crony capitalism and high unemployment that have defined the first three years of the Obama administration. Likewise, many of the young people protesting in the euro zone can’t find jobs despite their costly college degrees, and face a perfect storm of no-growth economies, crushing sovereign debt fueled by cradle-to-grave entitlement spending, and public unions that serve as ironclad barriers to entering the job market.

Young people
should
be pissed off. Someone
should
be fired. But the focus of Occupy Wall Street seems fundamentally off target. The problem is concentrated political power, not wealth per se. The problem is the unholy collusion between well-heeled interests and government’s monopoly on power. Shouldn’t Bank of America have to sink or swim on the merits of its business model, just like the mom and pop store around the corner? But if we rightly hold Bank of America to that standard, don’t each of us as individuals have to live by it as well? Justice is equal treatment under the laws of the land. Instead, more typical targets of OWS protesters are capitalism, capitalists, “the top one percent,” wealth possession, and wealth creation in general. They want to redistribute the pie, not grow it.