The Right’s ‘53 Percent’ Solution to Occupy Wall Street

In the last few days, the conservative movement has formed its response to Occupy Wall Street. The mere fact of conservative opposition isn’t very surprising — obviously, conservatives aren’t going to love a left-wing movement filled with counterculture types assailing the rich and big business. What’s more interesting is the nature of the conservative response. There is hardly any direct intellectual engagement or forceful restatement of pro-market principles. Instead what we see is a series of evasions.
For instance, David Brooks, in his column today, insists that the whole notion of contrasting the interests of the richest 1 percent against everybody else is simply irrelevant:

If there is a core theme to the Occupy Wall Street movement, it is that the virtuous 99 percent of society is being cheated by the richest and greediest 1 percent. This is a theme that allows the people in the 99 percent to think very highly of themselves. All their problems are caused by the nefarious elite.
Unfortunately, almost no problem can be productively conceived in this way.

Really? Let’s take a look at the income gains of the richest 1 percent over the last three decades, compared to everybody else:

This is an economy that’s incredibly great for the very rich and pretty lousy for everybody else. If you consider this even mildly problematic, you have several responses. You can try to help workers unionize, or restructure the financial industry, or challenge the loopy way we pay CEOs more and more regardless of performance. You can look for even more radical solutions, which some of the protestors favor, though I would not...

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Jonathan Chait @'NY Mag'