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The 'Occupy' movement will hurt free enterprise

This whole thing represents blowback against all the varieties of “macroeconomic management” – and that includes “stimulus,” “stabilization,” bailouts and everything else.

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Frank Franklin II/AP/File
In this file photo, demonstrators affiliated with the Occupy Wall Street movement gather to call for the occupation of Wall Street in New York. Monday, Oct. 17, 2011 marks the one-month anniversary of the Occupy Wall Street movement.
  • By Douglas French Guest blogger

Reading through the CBS news story on the globalization of the Occupy movement, complete with wicked violence and attendant hysteria, it seems rather obvious that this whole thing represents blowback against all the varieties of “macroeconomic management” – and that includes “stimulus,” “stabilization,” QE1, QE2, bailouts and everything else.

Who benefited most of these policies? Clearly not the masses and not the middle class and not the poor. It was the financial elites who benefited. The policies didn’t work and yet the elites got the money anyway, and hence the protests and mania, all of which are being used as a bludgeon not against the macroeconomic stabilizers in government and central banks but against capitalistic enterprise.

There is a rough analogy here to how U.S. foreign policy intervention inspires acts of vengeance against innocents – a reaction that the CIA called blowback. So too these Occupy protests might be seen as a reaction to economic interventionism. And no doubt that free enterprise – the real innocent bystander in this entire ghastly episode – is going to be hurt.

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