Occupy Wall Street promotes 'envy-ocracy'

By Ron HartThis whole Occupy Wall Street deal might be parents encouraging their deadbeat 24-year-old kids to get out of the basement so they can change the locks. Once they get rid of the smell of weed, they rent it out. While incapable of algebra or employment, these kids can calculate the number of grams in an ounce faster than Albert Einstein.

It looks like the Occupy Wall Street protest could last well into Halloween. I bet the kids sit around in their tents and tell spooky stories about how the top 5 percent of earners only pay only 59 percent of all federal taxes.

They are against bank bailouts of any kind; on that we agree. I am against even bailing out Tyra Banks. Their anger is misplaced and naïve, yet they are backed by the Democrats who bailed out the banks but who somehow have turned this into an Astroturf campaign movement. It is not like these kids do not know their stuff; they were at prom just a few years ago.

Many are burdened with student loans and no jobs. Low-quality education has too many kids taking out unrealistic student loans (Americans now owe more in student loans, $1 trillion, than in credit card debt), to waste on four years of drunken partying and debauchery or, worse, a degree in Women's Studies.

"Occupiers" rail against businesses financed with junk bonds, but they have received a junk education financed with government bonds. At least junk bonds yield a lot and finance jobs. The next bubble to burst is this inadequate, costly education (the cost of which has escalated at more than twice the rate of inflation and which has no quality controls), financed with outrageous, government-backed student loans.

Since schools do not seem to teach facts much anymore, preferring to indoctrinate their students, the result is that many of these kids are not hirable. They are shielded from reality by being taught envy-based courses which conclude that if anyone works for something, it is their lawful right to try to take it.

Like any group of people fortified with the perpetual excuse that they have been "wronged," they can blissfully spend their lives as wards of the statists. It has been a human proclivity since biblical times.

This indoctrination is creating what I call an incompetent "envy-ocracy": a degenerative derivation of democracy wherein the least capable of producing are governed by the least competent to lead. If the ineffective put you into office, it is an article of faith that you will confiscate money from the dwindling number of productive, hard-working people and redirect it to the lay-abouts. We know them as modern-day Democrats. They are personified by the Occupy Wall Street crowd who want their student loans forgiven and for politicians to take from the productive and redistribute to the least productive, thus taking our country from meritocracy to mediocrity.

The covetous classes taught in colleges and before set the stage for a lifetime of wanton envy. In fact, the blame game starts early if parents allow it. Teachers are even using dolls in first grade classrooms to help the kids point to the spot where Republicans touched the economy and ruined it.

What makes this work is the belief those who succeed must have done so by stealing. This explains the Occupy Wall Street crowd and the Democrats' campaign strategy.

Two things are sure in this world: The earth rotates around the sun, and kids will take the easy way out if you let them. An educational system that does not teach simple economics and self-reliance, but instead focuses on resentment and envy, will eventually tear our country apart.

The best thing we can do for our kids is to instill in them a work ethic, not a sense of entitlement, and then let the chips fall where they may. Since kids are a perpetual personification of their parenting, we all should do our best. Our nation's future depends on it.