The Occupy Wall Street Crowd Don't Seem To Understand That Government Is The Bigger Problem By Miles. In Fact The ROOT Cause!

So, the two main things I'm hearing from the Occupy Wall Street crowd is that:

• The wealthy class is unfairly rich and the government should do something to redistribute their income and
• They want government to give them free or nearly free college education.

Sounds good on the surface because, for sure, it's not fair for people to get so wealthy while being partly responsible for the economic mess we're in. Also, for sure, a college education costs too much.

But have you considered:

1. The contribution the wealthy make to creating jobs and providing resources for new business start-ups?
2. The ROOT cause of our current economic mess lies federal government policies and regulation (regarding sub-prime mortgages)?
3. The ROOT cause of the high cost of education significantly lies in federal government policies and regulation? The government took our tax money to cause this problem and now they're supposed to take more of our money to fix it?

Regarding #1, the following article makes some points you may not have considered. It pretty much speaks for itself so I won't comment further. http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/281292/equally-poorer-michael-tanner

Regarding #2 AND #3, when the federal government intervened in our free economy's natural checks and balances they became the root cause of the problems we have in those (and other) areas today.

Everyone who understands economics knows that competition helps keep prices down. Free Enterprise has been key to our country's economic success. Competition drives innovation too ... make a cheaper product that's a better one and you'll be successful. Competition is good on a personal level too (motivates a person to do more with his life and do it better). Government regulation is needed to keep the competition fair and lawful but when government tries to level the playing field out of a progressive desire for economic equality, it discourages competition and personal/corporate responsibility.

Pretty much every time the federal government steps in to force the leveling of a playing field they make things worse by discouraging if not nullifying competition. Every time the federal government subsidizes something, the cost goes up, if not on the specific thing they're tinkering with then on a competing product.

Take the ethanol push. The government didn't 'force' any farmers to grow only ethanol corn but what did they expect farmers to do when ethanol subsidies made it very profitable to grow ethanol corn? Not only did the availability of consumer food corn decrease, so did nearly all other food products because farmers switched from whatever they were growing to corn. The price of ALL food went up dramatically. It made world hunger a bigger problem too because of the cost and unavailability of food in poor countries.

Around three decades ago the government decided that a higher education needed to be more readily available to the poor. Noble intent gone wrong. College subsidies were extended to pretty much ALL students over time. Guess what colleges did in response? The government was guaranteeing they'd be paid no matter how much they charged students. Competition for student dollars evaporated and colleges no longer had to worry about keeping costs down so that the average person could afford it. The cost of college has skyrocketed primarily(!) because the federal government subsidizes it. There's a HUGE irony in all of this. So, government's well-intentioned meddling drove college costs up (which taxpayers have been paying for already) and now these protesters want the people in government who caused this problem to take MORE taxpayer money to pay for the problem government created.

The exact same thing happened to cause our current economic problems. If the federal government had not subsidized homes for people who couldn't afford to pay the mortgages we wouldn't be in this mess!!! Sure, I understand that Wall Street made money off this arrangement but that's not the root cause. Those mortgages were unaffordable and WHATEVER entity ended up owning them would have been in financial trouble. It just happens to be that Wall Street packaged these nonsense loans into high risk packages and traded them around among themselves in the total disillusionment that they could make money off them. Well, IF they were inclined to consider how risky those investments actually were, what was their motivation to avoid pushing them? Answer: NONE! Why? Because the federal government guaranteed(!) their money was reasonably safe ... all those mortgages had Fannie and Freddie backing. While it is true that Wall Street was immorally motivated to trade/invest these things, why did they do it? If the ill-advised sub-prime mortgage progam had never been created OR had been run by Freddie and Fannie with an ounce of economic sense, people who actually couldn't afford to pay the mortgages wouldn't have gotten them!

The big question is why did Fannie and Freddie push sub-prime mortgages (the ROOT cause of our troubles)? Answer: congress and Clinton told them to do it. In fact, one of the last executive orders Clinton gave was for Freddie and Fanny to make half their mortgages be these sub-prime types. The ONLY way Fannie and Freddie could do that was to loosen the qualification requirements so much that there really weren't any. The root of our current economic troubles is that sub-prime mortgages were pushed by government, mostly progressives in congress and the White House. Yes, Wall Street made it worse. But ONLY 'worse'. The housing market would have collapsed even if Wall Street had stayed out of it because whomever had owned those mortgages would have gone under. This problem would never have happened ONLY if progressives in our government hadn't tried to regulate nearly everyone into a home whether they could afford it or not.

The Occupy Wall Street folks are protesting the wrong culprits. Sure, Wall Street has dirty hands and college costs too much but if these protesters want the root cause of both problems fixed at the cheapest cost to taxpayers they need to protest congress, especially progressive regulation and other meddling. The 'fixes' they're calling for will mostly make the problems worse. If college already costs too much, what do you think will happen to the cost if it's subsidized even more? C'mon folks. Think about it.

What's hilarious is that so many people think that lack of regulation is what caused the sub-prime mortgage and, therefore, housing market collapse. In fact, it was government regulation that caused it by forcing (ie, regulating) Fannie and Freddie into lowering their loan qualification standards below what made any economic sense whatsoever.

One ought to consider what progressive-ism has brought us in recent decades. Their push to subsidize student loans and home mortgages is fundamentally at the root of our current economic troubles. The federal government is absolutely key in causing problems with both programs by forcing taxpayers to subsidize them and now we taxpayers are expected to pay more to a government that created the problems? The logic completely escapes me.