Most of us forget the gap between the start of the revolution and getting a constitution. The constitution was ratified in 1788 and the bill of rights was in 1789. Nearly 13 years after the outbreak of the american revolutionary war.

Getting good reforms to happen will take considerable time and effort. Our system needs some reforms to happen; hopefully not 13 years from now.

This is from the page on Bill Gates: “His father was a prominent lawyer, and his mother served on the board of directors for First Interstate BancSystem and the United Way. Gates’s maternal grandfather was J. W. Maxwell, a national bank president.”

So. Bill Gates is hardly a good example of someone who comes out of nowhere to become something. He is, as one commentator put it, “proof that in America, a rich, white, Anglo-Saxon protestant can become a richer white Anglo-Saxon protestant”.

I’m not putting down Bill Gates, here — he worked for what he got. But he started out pretty high in the foothills when he climbed his mountain; not from the depths of the lowlands. Holding him up as an exemplar of class mobility in the US is misinformed, at best. It certainly isn’t accurate.

I find the “occupy” set of questions to be somewhat slanted, and many of your questions to be so slanted as to constitute a push-poll. If it weren’t for a few scattered in there that seem to be equally slanted in the opposite direction as most, I would suspect you of doing so on purpose.

At any rate, I think that whatever the “occupy” movement is trying to do, they haven’t communicated it well. If they had, I’d have a better idea of what they wanted, without having to resort to Wikipedia to find out.

Here are your questions, properly answered in English instead of “1-5ish”:

More and better jobs:

Who could argue with that? But I don’t think that it can come from government mandates, or, in the long run, bigger and more patronistic corporations. Less and more sensible regulation of small business — yes.

More equal distribution of income:

See my answer above, with a healthy dose of cynicism on the word “distribution”.

Bank reform:

Well, _something_ went wrong in the lead-up to 2008. Even if you accept the bank apologists who insist that “the government made us do it” — if it was so bad, and the bank CEO’s so wise, why didn’t they spend some of their money for an ad campain and to buy a few more politicians?

Reduction of the influence of corporations on politics:

This, for me, is the crux of the matter. There seems to be a movement to give corporations all of the rights of “real people”, but I don’t see any of the cocommit responsibilities. What corporations have done jail time? What corporations do jury duty? What corporations have to register for the draft?

If corporations want to pay their managers, and their managers want to donate money and time to politics — fine. If for-profit corporations want to do so directly — not fine. Business entities should not be political entities. “How can this law make lots of money for the stockholders” should not be a consideration in the political process.

Campaign finance reform:

To the extent that transparancy is achieved — yes. We have freedom of speech, but it should not be freedom of _secret_ speech. If you fund some public speech, I should get to know you did it.

Media democratization (“that media companies be owned and managed by their staff”):

I think that’s called “blogging”.

Creation of “citizen boards” to influence corporate regulation and deter regulatory capture:

Logical impossibility. As soon as Joe Plumber gets appointed to the board he’s a beurocrat, not a “regular citizen”.

Expropriation of the health insurance industry:

“Just public enough to fail” certainly isn’t working. Letting companies provide health insurance tax-free, while not letting _me_ get it tax free _certainly_ doesn’t work for me.

My preference would be to do what the Republicans should have done in 2006, but were too busy trying to smear Democrats to do: even out the tax breaks. Either let everyone get their health care tax free, or let no one get it tax free. The current situation is just a mechanism to make it easier for big corporations to employ people, at the expense of industry-creating individuals and small businesses.

Immediate review of the constitutionality of the Patriot Act:

There’s a system in place already to do that. It’s called “the judicial branch”.

Immediate student loan reform:

To what? Make a prospective student borrower submit a business plan showing how their education is going to enable them to work off the loan amount? That works for me!

Gradual implementation of a publicly funded education system:

Nooooooo! So, exactly _what_ percentage of the costs of attending PSU are covered in tuition, and how much is already publicly funded?

Restoration of the social safety net:

I’m not going to touch this one, because I don’t have time — but the abstract of the abstract is something like: minimal care for the truly needy, programs to lift the helpless poor out of poverty and get them on their own feet, and remember that welfare should be there so that the kids grow up healthy and educated — and when you view it from that perspective, it is deeply flawed.

An end to imperialistic wars:

“Imperialistic” is in the eye of the beholder.

Employee ownership plans required of private corporations:

Not with my business you don’t!

Investigation of crimes of the existing financial industry, and replacement of that industry by “publicly owned, worked-managed” institutions:

All public corporations are already worker-managed. CEO’s just forget that they are mere employees, and in their misbehavior have made us forget too.

Measures to end tax evasion by wealthy firms:

If tax evasion is truely happening, then yes. If they are merely stepping into yawning loopholes — close the loopholes.

A truly democratic “economy and political system that works for the 99%.:

The 99% needs to get off their collective butt and _make_ it work.

RATE THESE OPINIONS REGARDING THE OCCUPY MOVEMENT:

Most of their demands are a disguised form of wealth distribution:

First, I disagree that this is so. Second, “wealth distribution” is too loaded a phrase for an impartial survey.

The super wealthy couldn’t have gotten that way without government suppression of the free enterprise system mostly at the urging of lobbyists:

I think that the free enterprise system is currently slanted toward big entities — but I use the term “entity” so that I may include unions and labor groups in the statement.

This is not just coming from the right: if you’re going to run a manufacturing business you either need to have at least one full-time compliance officer just to check up on all the regulations you need to follow, or you need to close your eyes to great swaths of law and hope you’ll do OK. Most small companies do reasonably well ignoring regulations — but it’s not a comfortable position to be in, and I think it does, indeed, discourage business (and hence job) creation.

But it’s not just coming from the left, either: tax laws are just plain structured to favor the very large, and very wealthy.

Government must further step in to prevent further concentration in the hands of a few:

Or step out. I think “step in” misses the point. “Restructure”

In America, anyone has a chance, like Bill Gates, to go from moderate means to very wealthy:

Unless I have my facts wrong that’s absolutely impossible. Bill Gates went from pretty damn well-to-do to exceedingly well-to-do. Stepping up from the 1% to the 0.1% can be done, just as stepping up from the 10% to the 1%, or the 100% to the 10%.

But there’s not many who can go from the ghetto to the 1% and make it stick.

The only way Occupiers demands can be met are to take from those paying taxes and give it to them such that the hard working tax payers will have it harder so Occupier oriented people can have it easier:

Way slanted question. Of course I disagree, but only because you’ve engineered the question to elicit that answer.

While it is true that more wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few, this simply reflects the fact at these days fewer people are willing to work hard:

I do not believe that someone who is born to the 1% and manages to stay there does it by “working hard”. I’ve certainly been working hard all my life, and have mostly managed to tread water, or advance a little bit.

The free enterprise system is inherently flawed such that it leads to the very wealth concentration the Occupy people are objecting to:

Another slanted question. The free enterprise system itself is fraught with flaws — most having to do with flaws in human nature. Furthermore, any “enterprise system” that has cops isn’t entirely “free”. Our current structure of strictures on the free enterprise system may have led to this, or it may just be a natural oscillation in demographics.

But I don’t think that _any_ system isn’t going to end up concentrating wealth and power in the hands of a few individuals with the energy, ability, and motivation to make it happen. Just look at what the Soviets did with their so-called Communism.

We need to make constitutional changes in our government so as to prevent it from being so partisan, corrupt, and self-serving:

We need to make poverty illegal while we’re at it — that’ll solve all of our problems at one stroke!

The Occupiers are the very form of revolutionaries that started this country and made it strong:

The Revolution was varied enough from person to person that I suspect a good historian could find personalities within it to buttress that point.

The Occupiers are just crybabies who don’t want to solve their own problems and just want someone to take care of them so they don’t have to take care of themselves:

Another sweeping, slanted generalization. I very much doubt that that statement applies to all of them, or even most. I suspect that there is a lot of genuine concern, and probably not a few people who have knowingly lost out on immediate economic gain to participate.

I was a student member, but I’ve let my membership expire over this, as well as the generally excessive amount of junk mail that various parts of the IEEE has sent me. Just in case anyone behind this survey reads this, let me be clear: I think your survey is inappropriate and in poor taste, and that your organization should mind its own business.

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re: Comment by Michael Smith
Dec 16, 2011 at 10:57 pm

“Can we agree that the amount of money is finite at any one time, and needs to grow at a finite rate (that is, at less than hyperinflation) in order to remain valuable?”

Can you explain why a “money” that loses value over time is inherently any more valuable than a “money” that gains value over time? I would argue that allowing some entity to “grow” the amount of money leads to distortions in the economy through both errors of commission and omission. This also ignores the inevitable temptation of manipulation of the mechanism of monetary expansion for personal, political or rationalized public gain.