…the rational herdsman concludes that the only sensible course for him to pursue is to add another animal to his herd. And another; and another… But this is the conclusion reached by each and every rational herdsman sharing a commons. Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit–in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.
– Garret Hardin Science Magazine
The ongoing outcome of the #OWS protests in NYC is predictable. Garret Hardin nailed it back in the intellectual hay-day of the American Environmental Movement. Hardin described the impact of the absence of accurate prices as The Tragedy of The Commons. He describes the society where the commons are free and no limits like mortgage standards or having to pay back student loans exist. We see the micro level of this happening already as the protest maunders on.
“They want to take showers, want to wash up and use the toilet paper to dry up. It becomes … you gotta have one person assigned just to clean the bathrooms,” said Steve Zamfotis, manager of “Charley’s” restaurant. Zamfotis, who runs a pizza shop directly across the street from Zuccotti Park, said he has to stand guard at the door — just to keep protesters out. “They expect everything, everything for free, nothing to pay,” Zamfotis said.
As Garret Hardin accurately foresaw, the free stuff army has descended upon the hipster commune at Zuccoti Park.
As the “Occupy Wall Street” protests enter their fourth week, donations of food and clothes have been appreciated not only by actual protesters, but also by an unwelcome crowd of freeloaders. “Basically the tourists take all the food and the hipsters take all the clothes,” one Brooklyn artist told 1010 WINS’ Sonia Rincon. “It’s a shame, but there are a few people out there doing that,” another protester said.
There will be more and more people doing this. Any economic model that models the demand against the price of valuable items will predict infinite demand when the price approaches “free.” This isn’t just math, this is human psychology. Prices are nature’s way of preventing sparse resources from being pillaged like Rome during a Visigoth Holiday.
This is where the #OWS movement can be accurately compared to the Egyptian Revolution. In Egypt, the old order has been thrown off in reaction to the burdens of forced scarcity. Hard-working people suffer the Punishment of Sisyphus in Egypt. David Goldman describes hardship far worse than the triple-digit student loan against the BA in Interpretive Dance Therapy below.
If Egypt’s labor force were counted in the same way as America’s, the unemployment rate would be 40%. The effective unemployment rate is even higher, for three-fifths of Egyptians live on the land, while the country imports half its caloric consumption.
The Egyptians rose up and killed the king in response to this vile duress. This solved nothing. The people occupied Tahrir Square. Show ‘em what they win, Dom Pardo!
“The magnitude of capital flight from Egypt right now is roughly 10 times the aid promised to Egypt by the United States and Europe combined,” or $130 billion a year, more than twice the capitalization of Egypt’s stock exchange, according to the Jerusalem Post,…
Niall Ferguson (Asia Times)
The Facebook! Jockeys celebrate, but the unicorns still don’t exist. The previously scarce resources aren’t undergoing reproductive cell-division to make The People’s Committee happy. There isn’t any manna raining down from heaven and neither the Holy Qur’an nor the Sacred Tao of Facebook tells the jerry-built government how to feed a mob of staving sub-literates.
Thus, the People’s Committee in Egypt does what nature tells them they have to. They figure out which bands of sub-literates are no longer valued enough to continue feeding. The Muslim Brotherhood pretty much pimps the thugs currently misruling Egypt. I’ll give you three guess at who isn’t getting any dog biscuits. You don’t have to guess, Powerline tells us what is happening in Egypt as a direct result of The Glorious Facebook Revelution.
Altogether, at least 25 Christians have been murdered. Verum Serum has more, including sickening footage of a Christian protester being surrounded and beaten with clubs by Muslim security forces who are joined by Muslim civilians.
As a Christian, the emotional side of my brain takes this stuff personally. As a rational reader of history, I can only say “What did people expect?” People like the #OWS People’s Committee will never produce anything of worth or value. They will never admit that prices have a legitimate and vital role in the natural order of human society. If they ever get power in America, they will suddenly discover “The Obama Dude” has, like, a bummer of a job!
Giving people like the Owsers professional responsibility can only end in one way. They prove themselves wholly incapable of acknowledging, much less solving The Tragedy of The Commons. After this obvious failure, the harder men, more willing to spike your face off the pavement; then get their hands on the means of coercion. The men of peace and men of dignity find themselves about where the Coptic Christians are now. This how a successful #OWS Movement would be exactly like The Glorious Facebook Revolution. I congratulate the fawning MSM on their apt and fitting analogy.
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