5 Conservative Economic Myths Occupy Wall St. Is Helping Bust

[marmar]

AlterNet / By Dave Johnson

5 Conservative Economic Myths Occupy Wall St. Is Helping Bust
For decades the corporate media has force-fed “conventional wisdom” free-market economic nonsense to the American public.

October 10, 2011 |


For decades the corporate media has force-fed “conventional wisdom” free-market economic nonsense to the American public. We have been told that it’s good to give more and more to the wealthy few, that it’s good to send jobs and money out of the country, and especially that that the people who run the big corporations are better and more “efficient” at deciding what’s best for the rest of us. As those decades passed we watched as the wealthy few get wealthier and fewer, while the rest of us – the 99 percent – fall further and further behind. But we have had it explained to us that our lying eyes aren’t seeing what they are seeing, and that the obvious isn’t what it is. We have been seemingly powerless to change this.

Asleep

While time passed and these economic time-bombs messed up the economy, it seemed as if this fog of propaganda had lulled people to sleep. The uncontested repetition of free-market slogans led many to a bland acceptance that there was no alternative. Many of us even incorporated the concepts into our own thinking. Others seemed to accept the cutbacks, the fees, the scams, the disappointments and the obviously false statements as the way things are.

Occupy Wall Street has changed all that. You can take that stuff and stuff it, they said. We’re tired of this. We aren’t going to listen anymore. We won’t passively accept the economic nonsense the corporate media tries to feed is and that we can see just doesn’t work. At least, it doesn’t work for 99 percent of us.

The Top Five

Here are five “conventional wisdom” doses of economic nonsense that we have been fed:

1. Business does everything better than government.

Corporate conservatives argue that businesses and their one-dollar-one-vote system of decision-making is better and more efficient than We, the People's government and its one-person-one-vote system. They argue that constant competition, placing companies under constant fear of going under and people under constant fear of job-loss, focuses the mind like a pending execution. They say it leads them to do only what they should be doing and no more, in the best possible way, always looking for the best and most “efficient” ways, forcing innovation to occur. .............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/occupywallst/152683/5_conservative_economic_myths_occupy_wall_st._is_helping_bust/

[ProfessorGAC]

1. Hard To Argue In Principle. . .

. . .but not a very well written piece. Awfully light on examples, awfully heavy on the preaching.

But, i agree with the points, and still wouldn't put all those in my top five.
GAC

[IndyPragmatist]

2. I have issue a bit with the article

I don't know anyone who agrees with number one. Many believe the private sector is more efficient than the government in most ways, but I have never come across someone who thinks that military or transportation are better served privately (people that say the private sector could run all highways are usually just trying to annoy Democrats).

Number three is true. I don't know how you could argue that it isn't. Yes, the government reinvests the money, but it's obviously taking it out of the economy to redirect it.

I hate when people write articles like this. Sure, to Joe Sixpack, this might make sense, but anyone with a college education can see that the author is really stretching to prove his point. He went to the extreme on numbers 1 & 3, and it ruined the article, IMO.

[bigmonkey]

3. You yourself just confirmed that number three is not true.

It could only be true if you take the event of taxation completely out of context, that the money is somehow permanently removed from the economy by the act of taxation. In fact the moment it's reinvested, or even spent, it's back in the economy. How could you think otherwise? How do you spend money outside the economy?

[themadstork]

4. Never come across someone who thinks that the military is better off privatized?

. . . dubya? rummy?