Occupy Wall Street
As the Occupy Wall Street campaign gathers momentum the drumbeat of populist argument has swelled in an attempt to make capital by labelling what appears to be largely a democratic grassroots protest as both “un-American” and “socialist”. Of the former there’s no real rebuttal possible or necessary: that John Bogle was labelled un-American for inventing the humble index tracker tells you all you really need to know about the intellectual underpinning of what is essentially an unsubstantiatable slur.
Socialism, though, is a harder issue to shake off. Whether this matters or not is an question of personal conviction; but it does rather seem that the people making the accusation don’t actually know what they’re talking about. Nor, probably, do the protesters themselves. Let's face it, they probably don't care: but they really ought to, because Karl Marx could teach both sides a lesson or two; although probably not in the way he originally intended.
