One thing I’d like to mention regarding this whole Occupy Someplace thing is that many of the people protesting have a perfectly legitimate gripe – namely crony capitalism is destroying large swaths of the economy.
Yes, the Occupy Wall Street Camp-In Theater is full of the worst sort of leftists who are salivating at the opportunity to attempt to turn America into the next Collectivist Paradise, and while I agree that the “Occupy XYZ” brand is damaged goods, I’d hate to see liberty minded people miss out on a chance to find some common ground with a large number of people who aren’t all paper-mache-puppet-burning-in-effigy and Jew-hating Marxists.
Some of these people are normal like you and me (well… maybe not YOU, but my other readers) and it behooves us to remind them that the problem is that we’ve given the government the power to pick the winners and losers in the economy. Remove that power (and yes, that will also reduce the amount of welfare and safety-net available from Uncle Sam. Sorry, but that’s how life works. You can’t give them power to steal for X because it’s a good cause, but not Y because it’s not) and you will start seeing companies having to compete rather than simply be able to purchase a senator and get a law passed that stifles their competitors in the crib.
There is no silver bullet to this. Again, the saving of America doesn’t fall to electing the right person into the right office and giving them the correct powers, it stems from Americans not allowing their government the ability to damage the economy. It means understanding that charity begins at home and not at the barrel of a gun. It means allowing businesses, regardless of size or number of people employed, to fail, even if that means shutting down and laying off thousands. You cannot socialize the risk but privatize the gains nor can the converse exist with socialized gains but privatized risks.
The problem is that this type of effort is hard. Most people, both left and right, seem to want to make the process easy by electing a particular person, giving them godlike powers, and hoping they make the right choices and bring about the change people desire (then get totally bent out of shape when their god is dethroned and another deity uses the same power in a way they don’t approve of).
So, mock the stupid communists and hippies. Do so relentlessly as they deserve it, but don’t write off the hearts and minds of people who want change but may be so invested in Team Politics (i.e. “I can’t possibly vote for a Republican / Democrat!”) that they cannot see the forest for the trees. If you can, engage these people, see if you cannot utilize their anger as a spark to fan the flames of liberty.
And if not? Then you can mock them.