The Wall Street protests are happening in the wrong place--they should be staged in Washington, DC.

Few other blogs touched a nerve like this one.

When I wrote recently about the Occupy-Wall-Street demonstrators, I got a comparative deluge of others writing to say that I didn't appreciate the situation as I might.  The message was that if I was more understanding of the plight of the little guy and if I didn't like the financial fat-cat so much, I'd get the point that big business was corrupt and needed to be brought down.  

[Don't be entirely misled here, there were a fair number of others who, in effect, rolled their eyes at the demands of the organized lot--which, if they had there stated preferences would amount to a trashing of the Constitution, the free-enterprise system the country's operated under for more than two centuries, and what would fundamentally lead to a Russian-style, Marxist revolution.]  

It's more complicated than you're led to believe.

I've reflected on the various ways one can interpret this conflict and I've come to the conclusion it is being used as a political and economic Rorschach test--it depends on your starting point of view as to what you "see" and "where" the conclusions you make take you.  

So, if you think this country should start seriously redistributing money between people who have it and those who don't, there isn't much I can say that would budge you from that POV.  But, on the other hand, if you think the system might be rigged and is unfair--I think you just might have a point; the system isn't entirely wonderful and some of the criticisms of Big Business are not without some foundation.  

The culprit of crony capitalism.

But I think it's important to get one thing really clear before one decides it's a good ideas to dismantle Big Business and re-arrange the way the furniture gets rearranged in the mansion we call our economy.  And that is the point that Charles Gasparino makes in yesterday's New York Post: The problem isn't big, free enterprise business, it's crony capitalism that ought to be challenged.  

You see, if free enterprise was allowed to have flourished, the current objections to some bankers being fat, sassy, and rich evaporate real fast.  If capitalism--the free enterprise system--had been allowed to play itself out, and if there hadn't been any bail-outs, some financial institutions would have certainly failed, folded, and the people who ran them would be out of work and--just maybe--prosecuted and in jail today.  But that didn't happen.

They're protesting in the wrong place.

Specifically noted by Gasparino in his recent visit to Zuccotti Park: "Also absent was any notice of how the much-hated banks benefited not from free-market capitalism, which would have let them fail in 2008, but from crony capitalism that bailed them out."  This, it seems to me, points not so much to a failure of the free-enterprise system, per se, but instead of it's abuse and neglect.  

If you think about it, the system is self-correcting and self-disciplined, if it were only left to work by the mechanisms which have proven robust over a long period of time--to create the most industrious economy and prosperous society on earth; no, make that in world history!  

Thus, it seems to me that the first-order failure took place, in Washington, DC, not Wall Street.  Maybe that's the better place where the demonstrators might want to start with their many unhappinesses and list of grievances.
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