The latest Ideas Matter update from Max Borders includes a segment responding to John Hood’s recent “dissection” of the Occupy movement. (See the video clip below.)
Borders admits he’s less charitable than Hood when assessing the Wall Street occupiers:
Where I think Hood might be pulling punches is on the composition of the movement. Who are they predominantly?
Rich white kids. I’m sorry. I had to say it. Like Marx before them, most of these kids are the sons and daughters of rich people. They want to rebel against their parents. They feel guilty about their lot. (And yet they feel entitled to everything.) So when they whine about student loans, it’s only an extention of the fact that they either a) got suckered into taking them, or b) that they didn’t have to take them (thanks mom and dad!) and so feel guilty about that fact. They’ve taken that weird sense of guilt and entitlement and projected it onto the rich as a class. Why feel guilty if you can feel indignant? Make it a cause! A sense of purpose! They replace their rich parents with state as the default parent figure. Scary.
