By Rachel Marsden
Tuesday, April 02, 2013
PARIS -- Be careful about how you interpret what you're
seeing, as your eyes might be deceiving you. That's the advice I offered
viewers the other day on Russia's global TV network's flagship program,
"CrossTalk," when explaining that capitalism isn't facing any sort of
crisis, but rather is just being subverted by socialists, Wall Street con
artists and various anti-capitalist wishful thinkers who are corrupting the
once-straightforward relationship between work and benefit.
It has become common to describe the now-defunct Occupy
Wall Street movement as a rebellion against the perceived failure of
capitalism. The Occupy movement fizzled out largely because the anarchists and
various flakes involved with it were so collectivist that they denounced the
very idea of any sort of leadership that might have propelled their lazy,
entitled membership forward to an enduring legacy. Not only that, but Occupy
members overtly considered themselves the North American counterpart of the
Arab Spring. Such a perception is purely the product of wishful thinking and is
divorced from objective reality.
In reality, the Arab Spring was not the American-style
civil rights movement that many in North America imagined it to be, but rather
just more of the same tiresome regional tribal warfare that has been going on
since time immemorial -- only this time with a better public relations spin.
Nor was Occupy Wall Street a revolt against capitalism. Instead, what
protestors were really rejecting was the hijacking of capitalism by socialism.
So while some have been quick to pronounce capitalism dead, it's really
socialism that has failed.
Why so much misinterpretation? One of the intelligence
field's most renowned scholars, Richards Heuer of the CIA, theorized that when
an analyst sets out to explain observations, everything is filtered through the
bias created by the analyst's uniquely personal knowledge and experiences. To
ensure that an analysis comes closest to objective reality, the analyst must be
aware of this inherent bias, Heuer said, and must deliberately examine all
possible alternatives. Heuer taught that only by eliminating the implausible
can the analyst weigh the value of whatever persists.
How many times have you heard that the media is
"lying" to you? I know very few people in the media profession who
would deliberately mislead an audience. More often, it's just a matter of not
knowing what they don't know, as per Heuer's theory. And under the pressure of
a 24-hour news cycle, going through Heuer's process is often a luxury media
members can't afford.
Intelligence analysts can't afford blind spots that might
cost lives. But in many other cases, there's little or no incentive to expand
one's field of thought. In fact, it might be downright inconvenient to do so.
Would the Occupy movement have been as attractive to its target demographic if
it had attacked the corruption of capitalism rather than erroneously firing on
capitalism itself?
Wall Street isn't synonymous with capitalism. In fact,
the exact opposite is true: Wall Street has removed the "capital"
from "capitalism" and replaced it with leverage, filler, empty
rhetoric and other toxicities -- everything other than the result of
productivity.
And when did Europe and its financial system suddenly
become some sort of capitalist reference? It seems that everyone's talking
about the continent formerly known as "socialist Europe" as if it's
the epitome of capitalist failure.
Capitalism is quite simple and straightforward: the
direct exchange of private payment for the product of a person or group's
skills, talent and effort, as determined by the free and open market. There is
no proof that capitalism itself is suffering, except by its subversion at the
hands of socialism, corruption and meddling statists.
As much as the Chinese and Russians might want us to
believe that capitalism doesn't work for the average Westerner -- and I think
their "away game" on the international stage strongly suggests that
they know better -- the average American's annual income is still about five
times that of the average Russian, and about 12 times that of the average
Chinese, according to the latest labor figures.
Capitalism is the ONLY system that works for the average
person, while socialism is the choice of the state's favored few. And while the
latter might be appealing to those who find themselves chosen ones in a
centralized socialist state, just wait until the state changes its mind about
your value, and your wealth, security and freedom crumble like the illusions
they are.
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