Why the World is Messed Up

I am starting to think that the world is even more messed up than I thought.

We all know the financial world is messed up. The Euro Zone is crumbling. U.S. debt will probably be downgraded, again. Syria is sliding into civil war (but don’t worry, there’s no oil there, so the world won’t be intervening). Unemployment remains high. The economy remains sluggish.

But it’s not just the financial world that’s messed up; it’s the real world.

Upon further reflection about the Occupy Wall Street movement, it’s becoming apparent that it’s the older generation that ruined the Occupy Wall Street Generation. It was the older generation that told them that manual labor is bad, so they should go to college and get an education, so they wouldn’t spend their life “flipping burgers”.

So they did.

And now we have a bunch of 20 somethings and 30 somethings who have college degrees and no jobs. In some cases because they went to college to go to college because we told them to. They didn’t go to college to get training for a job; they went to college because we told them to. So they took arts, or humanities, or gender studies, or whatever, and when they graduated they found that there were no jobs in those esoteric areas.

But of course to make ends meet they can’t take a job flipping burgers, because we told them that manual labor of any kind is beneath them.

We taught them that life has a natural progression: high school, college, high paying job in an exciting career. Unfortunately that’s not how life works.

Businesses want to hire people with real skills. Engineers. Scientists. Tradesman. But we don’t send our kids to learn how to be plumbers and welders and electricians, because manual labor is bad.

In some parts of the U.S. the only people who will do manual labor are illegal immigrants, and now that they are being forced out of the country there is no-one to do the “dirty work”.

So we have a bunch of 20 and 30 year olds who have never had a real job, who have never even lived away from home, who have a degree but no job skills, and $50,000 of student loan debt, and no prospects. They won’t take a menial job because that would be an admission of failure. So they have no recourse but to camp out in a park for three months protesting “Wall Street”, as though Wall Street is the reason they have no jobs.

Obviously Wall Street is guilty in this story. It’s the big banks that made the stupid loans and took excessive risks to cause the credit crisis. But of course it’s also “Wall Street”, and the capitalist system, that created the iPhones the protestors are using to organize, and it’s Starbucks, a profit making enterprise, where they all go to buy coffee to keep warm.

The protestors are hypocrites, but can you really blame them?

We have idiot savants like Warren Buffet saying the rich should pay more in taxes. Mr. Genius is free to pay as much taxes as he wants. If he really feels that way, starting writing cheques, Mr. B.

The problems that appear to be caused by Wall Street are in fact caused by Big Government.

It’s the government that bailed out AIG, the brokerage companies, and the banks. The banks took stupid risks, and the government bailed them out.

If I was 25 years old, educated, with no job and I saw billions being handed over to the fat cats on Wall Street I’d be pissed off too.

But I wouldn’t blame the banks for taking the free money to cover up for their stupidity; I’d be mad as hell at the government for writing the cheques.

I’d be mad at the government for keeping interest rates artificially low and encouraging everyone to buy a house they couldn’t afford to stimulate the economy.

And yet I personally am not protesting against the government. Why?

Because the government is me.

It’s me, and you, and everyone else who elected them. I’m a Canadian, and I elected the “conservative” government that has run up the biggest deficits in our nation’s history. Americans are no better, electing St. Obama to preside over the biggest wealth transfer from poor to rich in the history of the world.

So if you want to protest someone, protest yourself.

And if you want to worry, take a look at the charts:

Since the double top in July we are still moving in a downward direction, with every rally attempt since the start of October failing. The 50 day moving average is in jeopardy, and a test of the October lows is very possible.

So hold your gold, keep a tight stop on your stocks, and if you really want to know who to blame for this mess, do what I’m doing: look in the mirror.

Tagged as: occupy wall street