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Criticize my speech to OWS

I like it. this:

I know, I know, this is where I lose all of the Stockholm Syndrome taxation survivors,
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is why most here don't.

have you watched any Stefan Molyneux?
"that which we create to serve us, ends up controlling us.."
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I think you should substitute "steal" for "take from us by force"
 
psionl0 said:
Have you got any ideas on how the problems that you perceive can be dealt with or is this just a pure rant?
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Yes, that's something else that jumped out at me. What's the call to action? Now that you've got everyone fired up, what are they supposed to do?

The answer seems to be: vote against all (new? excessive?) taxes and against government benefits, tighten your belts so you can do without most government services, be prepared with useful skills and some emergency savings in case of an economic crisis, plan for your own retirement... but the speech doesn't actually say that, and I'm not even sure that's the conclusion I'm supposed to draw.
 
The Central Scrutinizer said:
To be honest, I stopped reading when you equated taxes to stealing. Did it get even worse?
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Agreed, like it or not taxes = maintained infrastructure. I have yet to see a single tax rebeling tycoon out in the road filling any potholes on his own initiative. Therefore the premise of taxes as theft is bullpuckey plain and simple.
 
atr0p1s said:
My first piece of constructive criticism. I will try to change the words around from "theft" to "take from using threats of violence" or "appropriate against your will" to get people to read further. Thanks for the input!
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Different words same crap premise. Again taxes = maintained infrastructure, and while at it, maintenance of a National Defense as well.
 
mikeyx said:
Agreed, like it or not taxes = maintained infrastructure.
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Privately-owned roads, electric grids, buildings etc. aren't maintained?

"We use taxes to maintain infrastructure" is not equivalent to "without taxes, we cannot maintain infrastructure".
 
AvalonXQ said:
Privately-owned roads, electric grids, buildings etc. aren't maintained?

"We use taxes to maintain infrastructure" is not equivalent to "without taxes, we cannot maintain infrastructure".
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main streets, public roads, etc? Not every road is private last I checked. Next large disaster you might just be happy there's a National Guard to airlift in supplies.
 
mikeyx said:
main streets, public roads, etc? Not every road is private last I checked.
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I'll say it again -- "We use taxes to maintain infrastructure" is not equivalent to "without taxes, we cannot maintain infrastructure".

There are alternatives to taxation.
 
AvalonXQ said:
I'll say it again -- "We use taxes to maintain infrastructure" is not equivalent to "without taxes, we cannot maintain infrastructure".

There are alternatives to taxation.
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but only two really? borrowing, or Ctl+P ?
 
Thanks for the feedback. I guess I stick to the "people vs government" perspective because it feels that my generation has been stuck with a raw deal, we are getting taxed to pay for all of the social programs of the past 50 years (since the government ran deficits and shifted the cost to the future generations) without being able to enjoy them nearly as much as they did. Now that we have no jobs to pay for the boomers retirement I guess they want us to just authorize more borrowing in our children's names to keep the system going? And there is no political input possible without massive lobbying and other bribery, just look at what happens when we try to affect the system (through protests and voting)... not much. Seems might makes right in our country. It's depressing and I can't wait till this is over.
 
Why are you blaming baby-boomers for the dishonesty of politicians? Every election they promised to "balance the budget" and after every election, they increased the budget deficit.

The only difference today is that the budget deficit is so irreversibly high that they don't promise to bring the deficit down any more. Even voters would realize they were being lied to.
 
The Central Scrutinizer said:
To be honest, I stopped reading when you equated taxes to stealing. Did it get even worse?
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Same here.

We can formulate it in another way: a human might have the right to live without taxes, outside of any nations whose tax-payed armies protect the human. But then the human would be easy prey for any criminal, terrorist, thief or slave-trader.
 
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atr0p1s said:
Because politicians are all baby boomer age now?
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You think that saying anything to get elected then doing the bidding of the people who bankrolled your election is a baby-boomer thing? I have news for you. Politicians have been lying since before SCRUT was born.
 
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I do think there are a lot of things to criticize the OWS people over (from their Lack of Focus on specific solutions, to the 'extremist' elements among them.)

Personally, if I were making a 'speech', I'd spend more time pointing out how, while they contemn 'wall street' excesses:
- Many of the 'problems' that caused the 2008 collapse (and the mess we're in now) were concentrated in the financial services sector... many industries continued to operate successfully, yet all of "Wall Street" is getting tarnished
- One point that tends to get lost is what exactly is meant by "corporations are people". The OWS people seem to use it as a rallying cry as a way to condemn businesses (i.e. stating "corporations are not people"), but by and large corporations are owned by individuals, including those with simple pension plans, or just a few bucks in their 401k. The same with many proposed "solutions"... "corporations" and "taxes" are not some sort of mythical things that make money vanish or reappear; money gets reinvested, spent, transferred, etc. Those big corporate profits get spent to help companies expand, or get put into dividends which go to investors (some of which are not exactly wealthy) or spent.

Some specific criticisms:

atr0p1s said:
Whenever the government pays for something, such as the salaries of government employees, politicians, cops, firemen, road crews, contractors, the costs of war, etc, it only has two sources of income to pay for it. The first is borrowing money from other countries at interest through the sale of bonds, and the other is theft.

That's right, stealing.
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As others have pointed out, equating taxes=stealing is not an appropriate thing to do.
Once we left the gold standard and switched from using an actual commodity based currency to a fiat currency based on nothing, practical fractional reserve banking became a reality.
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Ummm... I know the OWS people are pretty unfocused, but I doubt the issue of the 'gold standard' is something any of them care about.

Of course, I could also point out that if you're viewing the gold standard as some sort of solution, that we went through even worse economic times while the U.S. was following a "gold standard".

By the mid 2000s, with multiple wars going on and having moved all of our factories overseas, there were simply not enough people making money left to steal from, primarily because it is either illegal for people to work (see: minimum wage) or simply because it is unprofitable to open a business (see: environmental, health and safety regulations)
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Ummm... technically the minimum wage doesn't make it illegal to hire people... you could argue that it makes it unprofitable to hire people, thus the minimum wage argument should be folded into your 'unprofitable' argument.

Of course, I could also point out that not all regulations are 'bad'. I assume you are approaching things from a 'libertarian' perspective. However, environmental regulations do address (to a certain degree) the issue of people "polluting" common areas (something that a Libertarian would probably be against.)

Combined with the mortgage money brought in by the housing bubble, the banks and their traders wagered it all in the derivatives and housing markets and lost hundreds of times what they invested.
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Of course, it could be pointed out that part of the problem with the derivatives market is the fact that the government wasn't regulating them properly (you know, regulations... the type of thing you were rallying against earlier.)

The government covered the losses of the banks through the bailouts, where it injected more stolen and counterfeit money into their balance sheets. This is where the Occupy Wall Street protesters get angry, because in their eyes, it was ok to steal money and to counterfeit as long as the money was going to something "productive". But now that the stolen money is being given directly to banks, that's something to be mad about, and I agree.
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On the other hand:
- Yes, its possible to be upset with money given to banks to cover their stupidity, but the alternative might be to see banks go under, which might be even worse for the economy as a whole
- Keep in mind that in some cases the money has been returned. (So it was a loan rather than donation.)

People are starting to voice their complaints, now that their bribes are going away. The police have switched from solving expensive crimes like homicide and rape to ticketing, red light cameras, and arresting people for victimless crimes like drug use to save money.
..
I don't care how many people say they support the troops overseas. Once the military comes home from Iraq and Afghanistan the unemployment will hit double digits
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Ummm... given the type of individual who would be involved in OWS, complaining about drug laws is probably something that they'd actually like in your speech. Same with anything that suggests that foreign wars are bad.
 
The major problem is you'll never get past the first paragraph if you intend on speaking to OWS. They have a tendency to interrupt themselves, and drive their own supporters away.
 
I've got to get back to work, thanks again for the input. To leave on a high note I have now reworked it to play to the Godwin crowd, enjoy :-)

Have you guys have seen the History channel documentary about that one country that kept attacking other countries, creating a multi-front war, had secret internment camps, used torture on their enemies (and their own people), and selected a religious minority and blamed them for causing all of the nation's problems, leading to the persecution of that people? I remember something about their motto being, "God is with us", or "one nation under God" or something like that, they definitely had an eagle as their mascot, that I remember. Which country was that again? it was definitely the one that had the police state, where you had to present your papers to the authorities and those authorities answered to no one? I also think it was the one where state power was consolidated after a terrorist attack? Didn't they have the power to spy on their citizens without warrants? Whatever happened to that country? Why did people continue to pay for their government to do those things in their name? If I remember correctly that country was destroyed and viewed by people today as the ultimate evil, but I could be wrong.

Later guys.
 
Secret internment camps?
Police answer to no one?

If you plan on addressing a group of people you may want to drop in a bit of accuracy from time to time.
 
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