One of the most disturbing points about the current OWS movement is its focus on punishment. "Wall Street," an aggregate community, must be "punished" for aggregate sins.

There seems to be little examination of what these sins are, however. Wall Street, in its initial composition, was a transactional business, a middle man. Middle-man prejudice, in fact, is a well known phenomenon.

There are REASONS that Wall Street in its modern form is abusive. It mostly has to do with the mingling of public and private interests together ... mercantilism. Mercantilism in this modern era is driven by central banking and the unlimited funds it gives to a shadowy elite that hides behind "rule of (state) law."

We've also heard the argument that fraud causes financial bubbles. But financial bubbles are caused by monetary inflation, which is the result of central banking overprinting of money. Financial bubbles surely provide a good incubating environment for fraud (as people are more apt to fall for scams during a boom when money is seemingly plenteous), but to focus on punishing the fraud without shutting down the mechanism (money printing) is to allow the cause to go unchecked while focusing on the symptoms.

Wall Street is so large and profitable these days because of regulation and central banking. Get rid of regulation and you'll have no more regulatory capture. Get rid of central banking and you'll starve modern Wall Street of its oxygen, what it needs to breathe. These are perfectly do-able procedures, but at this point we hardly see them being suggested. 

No the rhetoric (and its media focus) is seemingly about class envy and the rich not paying "their faire share." it is as if the system that caused the current economic crisis is immutable and unchangeable. All that can be done is to attack the beneficiaries of the system in the name of "social justice." 

Rather than attacking the problem of modern authoritarianism, OWS grass-roots protesters often seem to be intent on using that same authoritarianism to punish THEIR perceived enemies. Their chosen weapon is the state. But Western governments at this point are quite large and corrupt. Government is nothing if not adept at making up crimes.

We've argued for the longest time that eventually Western societies may unravel enough so people will begin to take justice into their own hands. This is called "private justice" and has been demonized in the modern era.

However, private justice for the most part has nothing to do with lynching or mob rule but with various time-honored methodologies of dealing with perceived fraud, criminality, etc. It is ad hoc and effective and often avoids violence and incarceration. It is the way justice was handled for thousands of years. The modern regulatory state and its "justice" is a fairly new invention.

You can see other points of view here: "What Pushed Me From Limited Government To Anarchy?"

You can see a longish video here by Austrian Hans Herman Hoppe on issues of private justice:

(Video from Nielsio's YouTube User Channel.)

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