The Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement, obsessed with fairness, has benefitted from the lack of it. The protesters don't think so but that is because many of them have not thought enough.
The demonstrators resent disparity. So consider the disparity in coverage of OWS and the Tea Party. A single (still unsubstantiated) allegation that someone in the crowd at a 2010 Tea Party rally in Washington hurled a racial slur at Rep. John Lewis sufficed to prove the entire movement a kissin' cousin of the KKK. But that "Google Wall Street Jews" guy? A lone nut. As for the signs calling for the "death of capitalism" and telling Wall Street bankers to "Jump, you [expletives]" and declaring "capitalism can't be fixed we need revolution"? Unrepresentative, surely. Ditto the 5:30 Oakland seminar on Marxism 101, and the dude in the Lenin T-shirt, and. . . .
Don't feel bad if you missed such tidbits on the nightly news. Every movement has its whack jobs, but those on the left get politely overlooked.
See also: the asymmetry of municipal authorities' approach to free speech. The Richmond Tea Party is justifiably cheesed off that it had to shell out thousands of dollars for permits and whatnot to hold rallies in Kanawha Plaza downtown, while OWS protesters squatted there for more than two weeks free of charge. Tea Party groups elsewhere have reported similar disparate treatment. As the Atlanta Journal-Constitution noted last week, "Tea Party co-founder Julianne Thompson . . . has made a request in writing after being denied permission to hold an event downtown because city officials said there was too much red tape and cost involved." Yet Atlanta's Democratic Mayor Kasim Reed issued an executive order granting special permission to OWS protesters to camp in Woodruff Park until Nov. 7.
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But then, serious thought about fairness is meager among OWS protesters whose top concern, based on a textual analysis of the 99 Percent blog, is student debt. Repaying loans can be hard, and this evidently makes the obligation unfair in the eyes of many demonstrators. But loans are made because borrowers promise to pay the money back. If borrowers break their promises, the loans will dry up, which would not be fair to future would-be borrowers. The keeping of promises is a basic moral duty and a self-imposed one to boot. But it can seem unfair, if you have the moral philosophy of a 4-year-old.
The OWS focus on money and economics only exposes the poverty of its quasi-Marxist critique. Equality has more than one dimension. William Niskanen, who died last week, once invited us to consider two young men: "One . . . is healthy and handsome, spends his days on the beach, has his pick of young women companions, and makes $10,000 a year. Another . . . is confined to a wheelchair, has congenital body odor, has never had an intimate relationship, and, with no other life, makes $100,000 a year as an expert computer programmer. In this case, who is worse off? Who should redistribute what to whom and how?"
