Beating the Drum

Katherine Ernst on the Wall Street protests:

Most everyone is aware of how unserious Occupy Wall Street is. The New Republic mocks it. Salon laments its fecklessness, and then curses Fox News for noticing it. Mother Jones sheepishly dubs the childish schizophrenia “The Kitchen Sink Approach” in a piece on the movement’s inertia. Nicolas Kristof of the New York Times, who must’ve seen Zuccotti Park through beer goggles, concedes: “Where the movement falters is in its demands: It doesn’t really have any. . . . So let me try to help.” He then offers some straight-laced financial bullet points, some nice tax n’ trade talk, as though the protesters just needed Dad to take off the training wheels so they can speed off by themselves into adulthood.

Law professor Stephen Bainbridge on the anti-corporation argument. An excerpt:

This “corporations run the government” meme has been around since the 1970s, and it’s no more true now than it was then. As Rick Moran points out, if corporations really ran the government would we have an EPA, OSHA, SEC, the EEOC, the FHA, the Department of Labor, or any of the other number of state and federal agencies regulate corporate behavior? If corporations truly “ran” the government, then why would any of these organizations exist?

[Conspiracist response to Bainbridge: That's only a clever ruse to fool us. You must be a corporate tool.]