Wall Street and wealth as a crime

The Occupy Wall Street protests are something that should concern even the most politically withdrawn members of the University of Richmond. At the root of these protests is a criticism of a common result of any free market society: the accumulation of wealth.

The quarrel, it seems, is not with the true criminals - those who orchestrate government deals at the expense of honest businessmen - rather, it is simply with the wealthy.

The system that enabled most of the wealthy to earn their riches also bears the brunt of criticism. Capitalism: a system that rewards hard work and ability and has subsequently made upper classes of the ablest and hardest working people, does not sit well with many.

Protesters use the term "greed" in pertinence to the wealthy few, but could it be contested that they themselves are motivated by a rapacious avarice?

"Regulate!" they cry - but to what end and why? "Tax the rich more!" - when the wealthy one percent already pays 40 percent of all taxes? "Down with the rich!" - does it matter if they earned their wealth honestly? Another emotion is at play here - and it is not concerned with correcting injustice.

A purely capitalist system does not sustain the likes of Bernie Madoff. It does not allow profit by coercion or robbery.

Wealth is achieved only by producing a product your market audience deems more valuable than all other alternatives. The way of life that has evolved around such a system is fondly called the "American Dream" - that will reap reward in proportion to your ability and efforts.

Occupy Wall Street contests that the American Dream is something different. "The American Dream has been stolen from the world," their website exhorts readers. "Workers are told that they aren't allowed health care, shelter, food. Students are told that they aren't allowed jobs."

It must be asked: Do any laws declare the pursuit of these items illegal? Certainly not. What the Occupy Wall Street activists are protesting is not the fact that they cannot have these things - they are protesting the fact that they are not guaranteed.

Pure, unregulated capitalism does not assure any of the above assets. Under it, you do not deserve a job based on your status as living. You do not have a right to health care at the expense of another.

Under capitalism, you have a right to one thing: your self, and by extension, your abilities, creations, efforts and everything procured by their use. By extension, all other are guaranteed this right as well; thus, to steal from anybody, whether by gun point or the clause of a regulation, is to violate your own right to you.

This is the system that Occupy Wall Street repudiates - a system that safeguards the wealth of others from the hands of those who desire it but do not want to earn it. And this is the system that guarantees the very quality of life that we enjoy as its beneficiaries and Americans.

By virtue of attending the University of Richmond for your studies, your life is being directly enriched by capitalism, via the magnanimousness of the late E. Claiborne Robins.

Mr. Robins made his millions by working in the pharmaceutical industry and using his own business erudition; were it not for a system that allowed him to amass wealth, we would not have a campus to set foot on, much less the scholarships and grants used to finance many of those footsteps.

Robin's generosity would not have been possible in Communist Russia or Socialist Germany, or in any society that did not value ability and effort, and afford their possessors sole ownership thereof.

To join the Wall Street protests and simply blame the wealthy for our country's economic woes is not only a mistake, but the acceptance of a moral flaw that has vast ramifications. If we are to accept the premise that to have wealth is a crime, we have already begun the road that ends with ability and effort achieving the same status.

The problem lies not on Wall Street, but in Washington, where regulations, loopholes and legislation strangle the capitalist system that has made us the envy of the world. "It is high time Americans occupied the place they ought to have been all along." - Washington.