Occupy Wall Street

I think the Occupy Wall street movement is a good and a bad thing. It's a good thing because it opposes the marriage between big business and our government. The picking and choosing of who will succeed and fail from the Federal Reserve, subsidies for oil companies, and tax codes which all but encourage the off-shoring of American jobs. All of these practices stack the cards in favor of the super rich and one only needs to look at the bank bailouts for a shining example of this fact.

Unfortunately, the OWS rank-in-file some how view these practices as capitalism - and nothing could be further from the truth. The general definition of capitalism is the private ownership of the means of production and competitive free markets. As soon as you have government bail outs, a central bank establishing interest rates, government subsides for large corporations, you no longer of capitalism. You have a form of socialism, but this form favors corporations and oil companies. We've had this economic system for decades.

The question is how do we change this? OWS protesters seem to favor a shift to almost pure socialism. I suggest we actually give capitalism a chance.