^ See, what people understand is that private businesses can only make money by serving their customers. In a completely voluntary market, he who serves his fellow man most makes the most money. Making money as a business owner means you are doing something that is a net benefit to society. Every single transaction that takes place voluntarily MUST increase the wealth of BOTH parties, or else it wouldn't take place at all. If I walk into a clothing store, and the owner has a tie that I like for sale for $10, I may choose to buy it. If I do choose to buy it, that means that I obviously find the tie more valuable to me than the $10 I am giving away to take ownership of it. For the store owner, he finds the $10 he would get in exchange for his merchandise to be more valuable than the merchandise, or else he wouldn't sell it for that price. Private, voluntary businesses SLAVE to serve their customers. I have friends who built companies from the ground up now selling millions, and most of them started off as a one or two man operation working 12 hours a day 6 days a week until they could make enough money to hire someone to help with the workload. It is wrong to initiate violence against anyone else. Period. the only morally sound excuse for violence is to use it in defense of violence. The state is an apparatus that functions ENTIRELY on coercion, threats of violence, or actual violence. Any time the state imposes a mandate, it is not a voluntary-participation "suggestion" or a "request". If you go down the line far enough, disobeying this mandate eventually ends up in violent kidnapping and/or imprisonment and/or theft of your property. Even rolling a stop-sign and not paying a ticket for long enough can land you in jail - even if nobody but you and cop parked down the side street was at that intersection at 2:00am. All state mandates are enforced at the point of a gun.To hold up a business as evil while allowing this institution to escape essentially unscathed is intellectually bankrupt at best. "We need to reform our government" is the cry of OWS. What they don't understand is you can't reform human nature - human beings always act in their own self-interest on a tangible or intangible level. Why are these OWS people protesting? It is in their own self-interest if they can get wealth redistributed to them tangibly, and for the intangible cause of "social justice" (one of the most truly fucked up principles to ever be mass-adopted).I like to put it this way: If you toss a dead body in the desert, do you blame the vultures for showing up? Of course not. Do you shoo away the vultures and hope that gets rid of the problem? If you want to get rid of the vultures, to stop feeding them, you have to get rid of the fucking body. We need to eliminate the one istitution that can use guns and violence to enforce its mandates and replace that with voluntary society whose most convincing enticement is "you really need this thing - it will make your life so much better. Oh, you don't want it? Okay. That's fine, too, I guess." Because some corporation can get legislators to write legislation that harms their competitors or exclusively gives them a market (as in cross-state health-care insurance prohibitions in the US, or the existence of patents), you don't blame the corporations. They are just looking out for their own self-interest, just as any individual human being does. It's just more appalling because the scale is magnified. What you need to ask yourself is "how the fuck is this even possible. How is it that if I see an insurance provider that will save me 20% on healthcare costs AND get me better service, I GO TO JAIL if I try to do business with them and they get a massive fine if they try to do business with me? how is it that a virtually zero-cost replication, using my own resources and property, of an intangible item can get me sent to jail. How is it that I need $600 million dollars to bring a single drug to market? How is it that if I want to make up some gold and silver coins and use them as money I am labeled a "domestic terrorist" and thrown in jail for decades? How is it that if I'm a doctor and I want to set up a cash-based practice in Canada I get thrown in prison?It is not because some "evil corporations" are doing whatever it is you are accusing them of doing. That is the stupid-person answer. That is pulling a fucking leaf off of a redwood tree. And yet that is what OWS is all about. flicking little leaves in the trees. The "evil" in evil corporations is VIOLENCE. and the legal monopoly on violence and the initiation of force only comes from the state. Not Walmart. Not McDonald's. Not Lowes. not Bank of America. You can decline them your money if you want, even still. Try not paying your taxes and funding 600,000 dead Iraqi's in the last 10 years, or 34 million abortions since 1970, or the biggest laundry list of rotten, festering corruption and sadism in the history of mankind.The poverty rate in North America was NINETY FIVE percent in 1900. By 1960 it had dropped down to 15%. This was the largest increase in overall human prosperity, measured by any metric including health, longevity, overall happiness, birth rates, career choice and longevity, happiness with work, travel opportunities and cost, cost of living period, discretionary income, etc etc etc. Since all of the programs OWS stands behind were instituted, poverty has stagnated at this rate. We may well have had poverty at 1-2% by this point. People who espouse the views of the OWS mission statements and "demands" are one of the reasons our standards of living have stagnated, and even fallen, in so many regards.Fuck OWS. We are in a car heading over a cliff. They want to put the gas all the way to the floor.