An Open Letter to Occupy Wall Street

To Our Smelly Occupiers:

Let’s get this clear right off the bat: I don’t like or respect you.  Your message is garbled. Your reasoning is labyrinthine. Your methods are repugnant. Your style is insipid. Your morality is reprehensible. Your rebellion is trite. Your raison d’etre is nonexistent. Most importantly, you are simply wrong.

Trudging through the mire of drug-addled mumblings and pseudointellectual jargon, the unifying theme of your squandered mass of humanity appears to be that you want the end of corporate money in politics. Yet with the awareness of a lemming, you fail to recognize that Republicans and specifically the Tea Party have been on the front lines of this fight for almost three years now.

Imagine political influence as a market. Unions, corporations, individuals, and groups are all consumers of political influence; politicians are the suppliers. That influence has value, which is set by the marginal profit realized from that influence. The market is impeded by campaign finance laws and ethics guidelines, of course, but the immutable laws of economics simply point towards the sly execution of dubiously ethical political quid pro quo in lieu of notarized contracts. It may not be technically illegal, but--not unlike you hippies--it doesn't pass the smell test. A lack of transparency makes it smell worse. The greater the value that political influence has, the more you're going to see corporate, union, and private money flood into the political sphere. Don't blame Citizens United for economics of the situation. Embrace the economics and get to work on a functional solution to the root causes of this corruption.

The single most effective way to impair the value of political influence is to constrain government’s authority. If government has less authority to set utility prices, then there will be fewer utility lobbyists. If EPA regulators have the authority over impeding private construction, then there will be fewer lobbyists for builders and developers. The protestors envision a beefy government as a bulwark against corruption. Precisely the opposite is accurate. A larger government with more functions gives the corrupt more places to hide transactions and forces watchdogs to cover more area. There is no salve to cure the problem of the influence of money in politics; there is only the scalpel (or in times like these, the hacksaw).

Yet, in contradiction to the single discernable goal of the occupiers, you ragged malcontents have politically aligned with the forces most eager to give government unlimited authority: communists, socialists, unions, and Jan Schakowsky.

When age sets in and your underdeveloped minds have grown a sense of shame, you will look at this country, glorious and free, and realize that despite the carefully manicured self-image of a bold leftist revolutionary, you were a conservative all along.  We'll welcome you with open arms when you're ready (and have taken a shower.)

Best Regards,

Boojtastic