Occupy

These occupy people have become cause for some head scratching. Originally I thought they were the usual grab bag of professional protesters and complainers and I still think some of them are. And I have no idea what they want. Well yes I know they want the world to be fairer and nicer and lets all hold hands and the like but.... what exactly is their proposed solution to the problems they have identified. It is hard for concrete thinkers like myself to get on board with ideas based on feel good slogans. But gradually and grudgingly they have earned a level of respect from me.


Our City Council is desperate to have them removed and stop them from making the place untidy and has called on the police to “do their duty” and forcibly evict them. The police refused which made the Mayor very unhappy. Trouble is I find myself agreeing with the police. These people are being totally peaceful and very polite. They don’t shout and carry on, they don’t get in the faces of passersby no one is prevented from their lawful business and I suspect with Christmas approaching and their “campground” normally be used for various events they are more than likely to politely move out of the way for the event and move back once it is over. It’s actually hard to dislike people who are acting reasonably even if you don’t understand what it is they want. Live and let Die I have always said so why should they be “bullied” by the police.

The other level of success for the protesters is I have been paying more attention to the rich / poor divide and wondering what the solution to this is. The current political flavours don’t seem to work. On the right we have “every man for himself and work hard” On the left we have the equally silly “let’s all share everything evenly” Then we have the Green movement which seems to desire a great leap backwards to a non existent fairytale world of gentle farmers.

So articulating the problem is pretty easy, the economic cake is not shared evenly enough. We decide what share of the cake you should get by assigning value to the inputs you bring to the economic table be that labour, mental labour or capital. So based on that equation some peoples inputs are not valued at a high enough level to make it work for them and they become (or always were) poor.

Assuming for a moment that the laws of supply and demand still work then the assumption must be that there is an oversupply of certain inputs which drives down the price. So who in our society is poor... as a general and almost universal rule it is the unskilled and the uneducated.

So on to solutions, the most popular are to either “create” more jobs or upskill the unemployed. Neither of which will work. There are no more unskilled jobs to be “created” we don’t need them any more and any way how does this help presumably more low paid work doesn’t really assist with raising living standards. As to upskilling, well despite a bit of hand wringing every now and then there are very good opportunities for education in this country so that doesn’t appear to be working. It’s the “lead a horse to water” thing.

In normal economics if there is an oversupply of anything leading to a reduction in price then people stop producing that thing which brings the supply demand equation into balance. Think of farmers and crops, if the price of corn falls too low they switch to growing grain or whatever. So here is where it starts to get tricky the obvious conclusion must be that we need to limit the “supply” of the unskilled and uneducated and this means limiting the support we give to people to have children. (see told you its tricky, and yes I am not unaware of the issues that sort of statement will raise in peoples minds) Yet as a society we like children and we do lots to help and promote the idea of children, but in lots of ways it isn’t helping. Apart from unemployment and poverty exponential growth in the population isn’t exactly helping the planet either. Time for society to stop promoting children. Try winning an election with that as a policy.