The Skid Row comparison rings so true.
Bloomberg, the ditherer!
Good riddance to Occupy Wall Street
16 November 2011
There’s no more full-throated a defender of property rights than a member of the anticapitalist Left asserting the right to colonize someone else’s property. “Whose park? Our park!” chanted members of the Occupy Wall Street encampment in Zuccotti Park as the New York Police Department belatedly broke up the illegal occupation yesterday morning. “This is our home!” True to form, several of the newly rousted Zuccotti squatters broke into another local park outside Trinity Church after a brief discussion about whether to “liberate another piece of property.”
While the number of people who commandeered Zuccotti Park was pathetically small—several hundred a night—compared with the weight of media attention lavished upon them, their sense of entitlement to take other people’s property, whether public or private, is unfortunately widespread. It is shown by the increasingly vocal and self-righteous members of the graffiti cult and their elite enablers; by the young gutter punks who sprawl across city sidewalks on the West Coast, demanding money for drugs and booze; by the anarchist members of the No Global movement who vandalize businesses and banks; and by squatters, who remain active in Europe, though their presence in New York City virtually evaporated during the law-and-order mayoralty of Rudolph Giuliani. The demand by student participants in the Occupy Wall Street protests that they be allowed to welsh on their student loans simply because they don’t want to pay them displays a similar sense of royal privilege over other people’s property—in this case, the assets of taxpayers who extended the loans.
Zuccotti Park had to be cleared for the sake of the businesses and residents in downtown New York whose livelihoods and lives have been severely burdened by the protesters’ monopolistic takeover. Equally pressing was the need to reassert the rule of law. Yet it’s too bad that some large piece of abandoned land in the middle of nowhere couldn’t be donated to the movement so that it could continue to show the world “what democracy looks like,” as one of the rousted protesters proclaimed.
Actually, we know what the Occupy brand of democracy looks like. In the 1980s, Los Angeles gave an abandoned rail yard to the homeless; crime became so pervasive there that the camp was quickly shut down. In the 1990s and early 2000s, L.A.’s homeless simply took over the sidewalks in Skid Row with tents and tarps. ...
-read on at link-
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