An interesting thing happened on the way to Occupy Wall Street…

There are hundreds of them, and they are–so kindly–willing to share their wealth with everyone else.

By their own admission, almost none of them have earned or worked for their wealth.Whether they are motivated by a sense of guilt or charity, or some other motivation, I do not know.

Two things are obvious, though: 1. the IRS will take a check. One percenters should feel free to write a check in an amount that will assuage their conscience at any moment. No one is stopping them, least of all the IRS.

2. Overwhelmingly, and by their own admission, none of them have ever had to work for what they have. While there is the occasional guy who says “I got lucky” and made lot of money, but most of them are clear: they didn’t earn it, they didn’t work for it, and they are glad to share it…as long as the government raises taxes on them all together…

…which leads me to think they aren’t really that charitable, but rather motivated by a sense of guilt or embarrassment, or perhaps noblesse oblige.  Going out in public and holding up these signs doesn’t cost them anything except time, and we’ve already established that most of them don’t need to work because of independent wealth. Holding up these signs says “I stand with you, Occupiers! I am one of you (even though I’ve never had to work a day in my life, flip burgers or work construction, use power-tools or lift a hammer, have ready access to cash and capital for school, vacations, and investment, don’t carry student debt or a mortgage,…other than that, I stand with you)!”

Nevermind that when the occupation ends, the 1% will go back to their lives fully paid for by some ancestors’ labor and ingenuity, while the rest will go back to the next left-wing cause of the week, their jobs, their debt, their underwater mortgages…

Meanwhile, the rest of us, are left scratching our heads. We’ve been working, sometimes two or three jobs, volunteering at our children’s schools, donating the occasion can of food to the local food bank, skimping on cable and internet bandwidth to pay down our mortgages and student loans, and generally, doing what we can to try to get ahead. We understand the American dream is what might be best summed up as “rise early, work hard, and strike oil.” And we don’t understand why the children of people who lived that dream now want to go ask the government to take it from them.

Write a check. No one is stopping you. Put your money where your mouth is.

Then go start a business with all that extra capital you’ve got lying around as part of the 1% and put some of those protesters to work. It would serve our country better than chanting anti-capitalist and anti-free market mantras. And, frankly, you aren’t standing with the 99% anymore.

We are the 99 percent. We are getting kicked out of our homes. We are forced to choose between groceries and rent. We are denied quality medical care. We are suffering from environmental pollution. We are working long hours for little pay and no rights, if we’re working at all. We are getting nothing while the other 1 percent is getting everything. We are the 99 percent.

That’s a sad story, but distinctly not what 99% of America believes or is experiencing.   Here are a couple of statistics from Daniel Indiviglio at The Atlantic [via Connor’s Conundrums]:

• Foreclosure activity may affect somewhere in the ballpark of 10% of U.S. households. That’s a tragically high percentage, to be sure. But it’s no where near 99%.
• 15% of Americans live below the poverty line. That’s clearly far too high a percentage, but again, it’s a small minority.
• Before last year’s Affordable Care Act, about 30 million Americans were uninsured, which is roughly 10% of the population. Of course, with the new law in place that number should approach zero.
• I have no idea how to quantify how many people are suffering from environmental pollution, but I strongly suspect if you got 100 people in a room and asked them, 99 would not say pollution is a huge problem in their lives.
• Wage growth certainly has been weaker than would be ideal, but 87.5% of Americans are satisfied with their jobs, according to Gallup. The underemployment rate is 16.2%.

If that weren’t enough, public support for income redistribution is dwindling. Dramatically. While it would seem to be in the interest of the middle and lower classes (the so-called 99%) to redistribute income to themselves, the reality is, as Scientific American reports, that Americans would rather not take from Paul to give to Peter.

It’s called the “Last Place Aversion,” and it isn’t even driven by the white, Republicans that the left loves to hate. In fact, the aversion is greater among minority populations and Americans who have below average income. In both polls and laboratory experiments, researchers Kuziemko and Norton  found that nobody wants to be in “last place,” financially, and if redistribution leaves them poorer than people below them, they’d rather just give the money to the wealthy.

In our experiments, most people still give to the person below them – after all, the alternative is to give $2 to a person who already has more money than you. People in second-to-last place, however, who would fall to last place when giving the money to the person below them, are the least likely to do so: so strong is their desire to avoid last place that they choose to give the money to a wealthier person (the person above them) nearly half the time. If Americans behave like people in our experiments, then it could be challenging to unite those in the bottom of the income distribution to support redistribution.

In short, it’s hard to believe that the Occupiers are A) representing the 99% or B) composed of people who know what it means to work, to earn, and to value property. Instead, as I look at the pictures of predominantly white, upper middle-class people hoisting cardboard manifestos for digital cameras made by low wage workers in Singapore and China, I see people whose noblesse oblige is driving them to push for what they think is in the interests of those who aren’t as well off as themselves.

I’ll repeat what I have said before: you cannot take from Paul and give to Peter and expect it to result in a net gain. People who have never had to work are rarely an appropriate party to decide what is “fair” for the rest of us to do with our money, our property. (and this isn’t even addressing that raising taxes on “millionaires” wouldn’t make a lot of difference in American tax revenues, anyway). If they were so charitable, why demand that everyone else be taxed equally? Why wait for the government to take it? Why not just give it, quietly and anonymously?

APROPOS: I have said nothing about corporatism or the interaction between corporate money and government. Sweet heart deals, tax loop holes, corporate contracts, and easy access to government officials are aspects of corporatism that have no place in healthy governance. However, the Occupy Wall Street protest has by and in large become less about corporatism and more about wealth redistribution, and that is the piece that I believe is unhealthy for our country.

APROPOS II: See the article below that says 49% of Occupy Wall Street Protesters supported TARP. I mean, what?!