But maybe they just want to say 'we're angry about this rising income inequality and we want someone to do something about it.' I think that's a valid stance to have, and opinion to express. It then falls on the government to either:

1. Do something about income inequality. 2. Explain why they can't or shouldn't or won't.

Failing that either of these things occur, it may inspire someone to run for office with the platform of performing (1) or (2) above. Any of these outcomes seem like a 'successful' outcome of the protest.

Not necessarily; there are times when it's more fit to just walk out into the street, meet others who are as displeased as you are, and try to figure out what to do about it on the spot.

Another way to look at it is this: The grievances of the protesters cannot be fixed by individual action. They require a change of the rules, i.e. political action. When such grievances become large enough, you (i.e. the people) use progressively stronger methods to try to tell politicians that you're serious about it.

If the political system is flexible and effective enough to react and address the grievances, then the movement succeeds, e.g. the civil rights movement in the US in the 1960s.

If the political system is too rigid and unable or unwilling to react, and the grievances remain, then the state will ultimately fail, e.g. East Germany in the 1980s.

Now, as a filter, introduced in addition to umpteen other ways to prevent legislation from passing, it sounds potentially helpful. Anything that makes legislation fail by default without an exceptionally good reason to pass would improve matters.

Bam.

I amazes me that when 500,000 people marched in London on the 26th of March, people were dumb enough to ignore the messages being sent, and instead focus on some superficial property damage.

But the name is "Occupy Wall Street". They know who their opponents are. They know who screwed with their mortgages and retirements. They know who paid off the politicians. They're out there with MacBooks and iPhones, tweeting and facebook-ing. Silicon Valley isn't their problem, and they know it.

(Edit: They're not even hammering Wal-Mart, and it'd be so easy. I think that says something.)

I did read another article where they interviews other traders about what he had said. While they disagreed with some of his other points they were in general agreement about that one.

> If you hold a protest and you aren't throwing rocks it will fail.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

To be honest, I am growing tired of arguing against people who believe that the economy is a zero sum game, along with all the other fallacies. I can just grow wealthy on the back of betting against them, which is what I suspect others are doing.

In order to move the price up, you need new buyers. Eventually you run out of new people to interest in the stock, and the price tops out.

If someone buys it at the peak and holds it, at some point they will either sell it for a loss, or they will hold onto it "forever" which ties up that money for them and effectively makes it a total loss.

In addition, in order to drive the price up, people are choosing to commit money to that purpose and not others. Competitors' stocks will fall. Other types of investments won't be done.

Clearly, it's a game of hot potato where you don't want to be stuck holding the bag, so you play musical chairs and end up changing horses mid-stream.

Let's assume someone has a foreign banknote and doesn't know what it's worth (it's a one dollar bill). He sells it for 20 cents; the next person sells it for 40 cents; and so on. Whoever buys it at a dollar is making a lateral trade unless he finds a sucker.

Anyone who left money on the table is essentially profit-sharing with the next person. In order to make your profit, you had to GET the money from someone else who already had it.

When you sell your $400 stock, someone else buys it, with the express purpose of having an asset that appreciates fast enough to outpace inflation.

It's kind of like the rake in a poker game. If your buyer sells it a year later for the "same" $400, it's not breaking even, it's losing 3% or more. You could posit a theoretical stock that always went up but still was always a loss in terms of real value, because it didn't match the inflation rate.

Let's consider the case of a stock that keeps falling. It's a money-loser for one person after another, and instead of profit-sharing they are distributing loss between themselves, balancing out the profit that has already been taken out. If the freefall rate is too fast for the market reaction time, then someone ends up selling too low, and their loss pays for whoever buys it and sells it at the more stable price.

The issue that people like to muddle is the "pie fallacy" straw man. There ISN'T actually any argument about growing the pie. We all know it gets bigger. There is no dispute about that.

The issue that has popped up over and over again the last few years is that something like (I don't recall the exact nubmers) 80% of the productivity gains have gone to the top 1%, or top 10%.

http://www.google.com/search?q=wages+vs+productivity&tbm...

Your gain also depends on other people losing in another way. If everyone has their money in "safe" investments, there is no demand for your stock. So you need to convince people to put their money in riskier investments instead. And it's risky because most people lose money.

In fact, the whole ecosystem is built on Venture Capital, and most of the ventures fail. As everyone knows, the VCs get paid a fee even if the fund doesn't have a return.

And if it does have a return, there are still all the losses incurred by everyone who put their lives into their startups which ended up not working out, which is something like 9 out of 10 startups. Plus the investors' money which was lost, only made up for by someone else.

And then there is all the wealth NOT created because you can't hire the talent, since it is in a busy-loop at some giant company doing something less useful, like making Skinner boxes, waiting for stocks to vest. Or simply being paid for bodycount, so a competitor can't get them. And then the demotivation that occurs when people have tons of money and find a lot of ways to spend their time other than slaving away on hard problems.

People tend not to push themselves once they've reached a certain level of comfort. What incentive does the Mob Wars programmer have to become an expert developer, now that he's filthy rich from a simple web app?

Creating breakthrough technology depends on expertise, which depends on experience. What might PG, RTM, and TLB have created with their combined abilities in programming?

ViaWeb had some fundamentally great ideas:

> We had a structure editor for manipulating these templates, a lot like the structure editor they had in Interlisp. Instead of typing free-form text, you cut and pasted bits of code together. This meant that it was impossible to get syntax errors. It also meant that we didn't have to display the parentheses in the underlying s-expressions: we could show structure by indentation. By this means we made the language look a lot less threatening.

>We also designed Rtml so that there could be no errors at runtime: every Rtml program yielded some kind of Web page, and you could debug it by hacking it until it produced the page you meant it to.

http://lib.store.yahoo.net/lib/paulgraham/bbnexcerpts.txt

I can see how reducing the cost of items or services can make more people "wealthy" - such as being able to buy a second car. But reducing costs normally means reducing wages meaning the owners get richer, and the manual jobs disappear.

Unfortunately, although it is possible to do so without taking it from others, taking it from others is still a viable way to do it. Further, its also possible to destroy wealth. And its possible for the destruction of wealth to be asymmetrical.

So is the current financial state an example of wealth creation, wealth transfer, or wealth destruction?

I'm looking at the national debt, the median house price, and the DJIA and I'm not seeing "wealth creation". What leads you choose "pie fallacy" as your answer?

Furthermore, TARP being repaid is not an inherently good thing. Who cares whether we got the bailout money back if the system is still completely broken? We're still in a situation where those banks can do whatever they want, and when things collapse the government will have no choice but to bail them out again because the alternatives are unacceptable. Now that the banks don't owe the government TARP money it has even less leverage than it might have had before.

That would be you.

We loaned citibank $25bn with TARP. They paid that back. You seem to think that thats the end of the story. Thanks for telling us what we should read.

Turns out we also guaranteed losses on $300bn of assets, added an additional $20bn, and a further credit line of $45bn.

From were I'm standing, that should mean we own citibank. If my company was in that situation, you think investors would offer me a loan? You think that's gonna be the deal you get next time your company is in trouble?

We should own it, dismantle it, break it up. Do that for every big bank down the line.

But forget the $350bn. You think that if your business needs $25bn or it goes under tomorrow, that one of these rich people will just loan you $25bn and let you pay it back when you can? LOL. In my world, $25bn bought citibank outright, and we overpaid. Instead we got 36%. Joke.

Two sets of rules. One for them. One for us.

Is it not, perhaps, the case that the situation was such that these jobs would have been created anyway? My complaint is this.

There are 400 rich people. There are jobs. You attribute a causal relationship.

I say, you could have killed every one of these 400 at birth, and we would still have the jobs (and to be clear I am not advocating doing that at all, I'm just making a hypothetical argument)

Now you might say that it is not these 400 individuals that matter, but that in any system with jobs, there would be 400 people at the top, and these people would have more wealth.

However, it is the "how much more wealth" that is the complaint. Not that there are 400 of them. The complaint is not that these specific 400 people are the problem. Nor that any such 400 would be the problem. The complaint is that a system that allows for the top 400 people to have such a disparate amount of wealth compared to the other 300 million is a fucked system.

To argue that without these 400 people, or any such 400 people, there would be higher unemployment is rubbish. That "we are better off because they existed".

Fuck you, frankly.

Indeed, its more likely that the richest 400 actively act to prevent individuals from gaining wealth and power that can threaten their own. As the feudal system collapsed, small businesses flourished. In order to maintain control, the ruling classes established laws requiring tradesmen to join guilds and pay fees. In the UK for example, guilds had to be recognized by the monarch.

In modern times, these guilds have been replaced by rules and regulations that have the same effect, but their justification is the same: "its in the public interest". Just as you couldn't buy cloth from a non-guild weaver in the 15th century - because it might not be good quality - so now you can't buy a car from Tesla unless Tesla pays millions of dollars for crash testing, or buys a design from an incumbent.

Similarly, patent lawyers. Accountants. That new iPhone app that records your heart rate? Want FDA approval for that? Want to be hit with a lawsuit for a covered medical device that you released without FDA approval? (because they are covered).

I'm not saying that a capitalist world run by a species that is happy to bomb its own offspring could be any different. I'm just saying don't fucking pretend that we owe them any praise. They get away with as much as they can just short of us rising up and killing them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Wednesday

George Soros made $1bn in a day. The UK Gvt lost 3.3bn UKP.

Some people believe that Norman Lamont rose to the highest office of economics in the united kingdom without the knowledge of how currency markets work, and that he could not possibly have known that his actions would be to hand George Soros, and others, 3.3bn UKP. But let us pretend that this was incompetence so that we can answer your point.

Did George Soros purposefully crash the value of the UKP? Yes.

I use this example, rather than other more recent examples like [1], because it highlights the role of government in the transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich. In short, if the government were to say to the common man "We must give this rich person one trillion dollars and you and your children will pay for it", there would be revolution.

But if the government says "Look! The stock market has crashed! We must give one trillion dollars to the banks so that the financial system does not collapse, so that children and dogs do not roam the streets, oh dear God we must give one trillion dollars to the banks now!" And nobody complains.

Better yet, give one trillion dollars in a highly recognizable bill, lets call it TARP. Make sure that all of that money is paid back. Then, when someone says "But we gave you all that money", the rich can claim "TARP? No! We paid all that back! Look!".

But also give several trillion more in completely one-off, non publicized, totally forgettable transactions. For example, give citibanks $25bn in TARP funds - and also give them $275 in non-TARP funds. Then have them pay the $25bn back. Amazingly, if you ask the average american about citibank, they will say "Yes, they got $25bn! Bastards". "No! They gave that $25bn back! Look it up!" "Oh you are right!" And that will be the end of it. Fox News will tell you almost daily, "Look who paid back their TARP funds! TARP has made a profit!". TARP is the hand they want you to look at, while they make your future vanish with the other.

You have to admit, its really impressive.

  [1] http://www.npr.org/2011/05/02/135846486/how-some-made-millions-betting-against-the-market

This would be a reasonable analogy if the hackers (bankers) hadn't spent the last decade paying the sysadmins (congress) to remove the safeties and add vulnerabilities.

Indeed you say this as if in the computer world, the idea of hackers just paying a sysadmin for access would be unimaginable. Certainly it appears that you haven't thought of it.

This trader is not intentionally causing crashes, but is increasing systemic risk of crashes. 'Purposefully' causing crashes is not necessary for actually causing crashes.

The problem is both the sysadms and the hackers. I don't think, though, that the anger is directed 100% at the hackers, though the location of the protest, apart from the actual message you see on the signs if you bother to examine them, may suggest otherwise.

Go to a bar and tell a few people you don't know "Frankly, fuck you" and see if they get annoyed with you.

You're conflating lots of of only slightly related things. I don't remember any economists saying that taking an ARM was a good idea.

I agree that the current state of the govt. is more than a little messed up and outrage is overdue, but you're doing the cause a disservice by talking about the wrong things and generally sounding like a conspiracy theorist. Public-only campaign financing is a good thing to talk about. Talking about how crash testing for cars is used to keep the good guys down is going to get you ridiculed by the opposition, and whatever movement you're associated with will be ridiculed by association.

This just doesn't make sense. The discussion is about inequality of income. Taxation doesn't change my taxable income. It takes away part of my income (and gives much of that slice to someone else).

The tax cuts you're complaining about are assessed after the income level has already been determined. That is, the salary number on my pay stub is significantly higher than many other Americans. Even if the marginal rate were cranked up to 90%, the fact remains that my taxable income is much higher than many others.

Both Democrats and Republicans go begging hat in hand and do the bidding of their true masters in Wall Street.

The bankers aren't angels, no argument from me here. But you're painting an absurdly one-sided picture. Why do you think it is that the bankers need the bureaucrats to "do their bidding"? It's because those politicians really do hold the power! It's true that the bankers are corrupting our democratic process by looking for favors. But it's equally true that the politicians are corrupting our democratic process by selling favors.

And from what I've been able to read from these Occupiers (and I grant that this is just my impression, and I may be wrong), it seems like the ire is directed at those bankers, and that they are looking for the government to help redress the problem. But the government is part of the problem. In particular, they're using their regulatory power as a weapon, hurting us by granting favors to privileged parties. Why would we want to increase the power of that weapon -- ask them to do even more regulating -- when that power is what's enabling the mischief? The only sane answer is to take away their weapon.

It seems to me that it was mutual, sort of a ouroboros snake swallowing its tail. Just as we could say that bankers offered promises to politicians in order to secure favorable regulations, so did the politicians offer favorable regulation in order to secure their own re-election. As far as I can see, they're two sides of the same coin.

That being the case, it doesn't make sense to demand that the politicians wield great power in order to exercise greater control over the bankers. We know that the politicians are corrupt, so why would we give them more power?

I'd argue that the unprecedented unemployment rate represents a clear systemic dysfunction. These aren't temporary job losses due to the natural boom-bust cycle, a very large portion of these jobs are simply never coming back. Whose fault that is is hard to say, but I don't think it's at all cynical to doubt that the unemployment rates will abate on their own.

It's also no secret that wages have been stagnant (if not outright dropping) for the past two decades. None of the trends indicate a cyclical nature, so it's not hard to suggest that these are systemic issues that won't correct themselves.

The quality of life of the average American is dropping precipitously. In a singular case we can point to any number of causes - lack of education, lack of self-discipline, substance abuse, etc etc. When multiplied a couple hundred million times over, it suggests systemic failure.

In other words, "broken", though of course we can argue about the meaning of "brokenness" till the cows come home.

FWIW, I'm the "4%". I'm definitely not doing badly at all for myself, even in this economy. In fact, my quality of life has never been higher. Despite this, it would be a mistake for me to dismiss the problems this country faces, or to jump to conclusions about those affected. It is perpetually disappointing to me how judgmental the wealthy and successful can be, using their singular case of triumph over the system as a wide brush with which to paint all those who have failed to beat it.

1) Do you believe it right that the financial sector was, and is still being, bailed out?

2) If not, how do you describe the system producing that result, if not "fundamentally broken"?

By the way you are distancing yourself from "conservatives" I'm guessing you are one of the self-proclaimed libertarians. But as far as the practical economical results it's the same crap, policies that end up making the powerful even more powerful than they are now.

I'm not assuming that you are evil, and I don't have some simplistic view of the world that you are attributing to me. But there are people that are taking advantage of the rest of us and we should be fighting it. We all live in a world flooded by propaganda coming at us from all sides so I always try to give people some leeway when arguing politics, and I try to stay informed on opinions opposed to mine. It is hard to break free from pre-concieved notions.

The liberal vs conservative (or libertarian) debate on economics has been about whether the bigger villain are big corps or big government. But I think what the new realization dawning on millions of people, especially those that thought Obama would fight against the plutocrats, is that they are both part of the same corrupt and broken system. You want to break apart big government, fine, but why don't you also want to break up the big banks and other monopolies?