Frank Pasquale is predictably impressed with the Occupy Wall Street movement.
The atmosphere was both positive and serious-minded. A band played music or drums that could be heard throughout the plaza. A group manned laptops on stone blocks. Dozens of beds and cots, covered in plastic, spread diagonally from southeast to northwest.
In contrast, I tend to side with a friend of mine who observed on Facebook that:
I don't understand why anyone is taking Occupy Wall Street seriously. An OWS spokesman "says OWS doesn’t need policies because they will create social change by 'building a model society' in Zuccotti Park, where people share food and sleeping pads according to their needs and arrive at decisions through discussion and consensus."
I guess the idea is that the American people will give up capitalism once they see how wonderful it is to camp out in a park and dress up like zombies.
One of the truly great things about capitalism is that it made camping out an optional hobby rather than a life necessity.
Update Doug Matatconis takes a look at what he calls The Incoherent Agenda Of Occupy Wall Street and comments that:
For the most part, the message, of “Occupy Wall Street” seems to be little different from the same leftist critiques of free market capitalism that we’ve been seeing for decades, and just as intellectually incoherent as those ideas were back then. Politically, it’s an odd movement simply because it’s rather obvious that these are people inclined to vote for Democrats. Likely, they were people swept up in the Obamamania of 2007 and 2008. To some degree, then, one wonders if they aren’t motivated as much by disappointment in a President who clearly never really shared the “progressive” goals that they hold dear, with a little bit of soak-the-rich resentful populism mixed in for good measure.
