British MEP Daniel Hannan delivered an electrifying take down of the central tenets of the Occupy movement during a debate about the movement at the Young Britons’ Foundation this week.
Hannan described the bank bailouts, which have led to a landscape now filled with “zombie banks, crawling malodorously with their bandages hanging off because we don’t allow the market to take its natural course” as he addressed three core falsehoods Occupy — and many Democrats — puts forth:
1) The idea that we are living through a failure of capitalism, crisis of the market system2) That the banking collapse was caused by a lack of regulation3) The idea that we have been brought here by greed, by human weakness
Said Hannan:
Think of who have been the real enemies of Wall Street, the real enemies of stock exchanges through the ages. They’ve got some pretty dishonorable foes. During the Second World War, the city of London was repeatedly targeted by the Nazis, because they understood that the free-market system was part of what they saw as our degenerate system–in other words, one based on free contract and personal liberty. The stock exchange was repeatedly singled out by Luftwaffe bombs. When the Soviet Union expanded, the first thing they would do taking over a new country would be to close down the Bourse. And on September 11, the murderers struck at the heart of New York capitalism, well understanding that the thing they most disliked and resented about the West, the personal freedom, was represented in that building. Surely we are better than to line up with those kinds of enemies.So no, don’t Occupy Wall Street, don’t occupy the London Stock Exchange, don’t even occupy St. Paul’s on the grounds that it’s on the way. Occupy the central banks that have printed the money in order to get around the failures of a handful of banksters. Occupy the houses of the politicians who have voted to give your money to people who are not prepared to live with the consequences of their own errors.
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