There is no 99%.

In fact, these protesters making the claim that they represent 99% of the people is about the silliest thing I’ve ever heard. 54% of Americans own stock. While 1.5% of Americans belong to the National Rifle Association, between 35% to 50% own a gun. 20% of Americans smoke tobacco. 40% of high school seniors have used marijuana.

The only point I am trying to make is that this country is not 99% anything. You have to twist divisions out of all rationality to imply that kind of unity. 99% of Americans have eaten a tomato. The difference between that (imaginary) statistic and the claim of the 99ers is that eating a tomato is a binary event. Each person  either has eaten a tomato, or has not. Group membership is clear - perhaps there is a market for t-shirt makers here. Economic level, however, is a spectrum. There is no significant difference between someone in the top 1% of income earners and those in the top 2%, or top 5%. This whole thing is just a rhetorical tool used by hate mongers to imply some sort of justified class warfare. It’s baloney.

This movement is being orchestrated online. The advocates claim this as proof of democratization (note to self: a topic for another column), it is, rather, proof of their idiocy. How do people with smart phones and computers justify themselves as downtrodden? Neither is a necessity of life, neither is a right. These people are among the world’s elite - put there by the system they condemn.

And if they want to complain about inequality, I submit that there is a greater difference between the elite and the not-s0-elite under socialism than under capitalism. And, under socialism, the stratification is far more rigid than under capitalism.

This entry was posted on 19. November 2011 at 16:25 and is filed under economics, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.