Walter Vrooman, economic equality, Occupy Wall Street, and other lost causes

As we watch the swirling turbulence of social upheaval that is known as Occupy Wall Street, there is a temptation to credit it with good intentions (change for the better) and then to wish for its success (hope against hope).

Such movements of hope and change have arisen repeatedly in modern history. The change is always temporary. The hope is always illusory. Yet we as a society remain as gullible as ever — serial offenders who fall victim time and time again to the con game of economic equality because who, after all, could be against equality?

Well, that’s pretty simple really.

Anyone who is in favor of fairness has to be against equality. You should watch New York University law professor Richard Epstein explaining “The Good Side of Economic Inequality” to a mostly stunned PBS reporter (http://tinyurl.com/3asz3u3) to get schooled in why inequality actually is the spur which encourages economic growth. Or check out broker-investor Peter Schiff as he challenges Occupy Wall Street protesters (http://tinyurl.com/3bcp39x) to tell him how much of his money they want the government to take away from him.

This really should be Economics 101 to an educated nation, but the problem is we aren’t an educated nation — not really. Instead of No Child Left Behind, our national education slogan should be No Liberal Shibboleth Left Behind. The problem with teaching economics in high school is that we would run the very high risk of having our children turned against capitalism by teachers who prefer socialism. That already happens now, of course, but not overtly.

But let’s face it, this is nothing new. The United States has been facing a steady stream of economic reformers, educators and socialists seeking to dismantle capitalism for at least a hundred years. One man who embodied all three of those components — reformer, educator and socialist — was Walter Vrooman, a name of absolutely no import today, but who might be deemed the patron saint of lost causes even more so than St. Jude. Indeed, Vrooman presided over one lost cause after another till he died a broken man who had even stolen from his own wife to pay for his socialist schemes.

As he lay on his deathbed at the age of 35 in 1904, here is how the Fort Wayne Morning Journal-Gazette described him:

“Vrooman crowded into 20 years more socialistic activity than any other man in this country, and in the furtherance of his schemes, all of which failed, he has expended sums estimated to amount to millions. This included part of his wife’s fortune.”

The Joplin [Mo.] Daily Globe wrote about the dying Vrooman that he had spent $10 million in socialistic schemes, and that, “This vast sum has been drawn from the pockets of more or less intelligent persons by a remarkable linguistic ability.”

I suppose that “linguistic ability,” which the paper also labeled “his plausible tongue,” could convince even the canny that he wasn’t as bad as he seemed. Maybe that’s why the Daily Globe ended its story rather generously by noting, “It has never been charged that Vrooman was dishonest — he was merely impractical.”

That summation may very well be applied not just to Vrooman, but the entire history of socialistic enterprises. Has a well-intended solution to mankind’s eternal problems ever been less practical than socialism — a philosophy which accounts for every eventuality except human nature? And yet hundreds, thousands, millions are enticed to “fall for it” out of an honest, misplaced desire to “do good.”

Poor, earnest Walter Vrooman was dogged in his efforts to bring economic equality to the world, and thus was a fitting progenitor of the Occupy Wall Street movement that proposes such grand schemes as a guaranteed income without the need to work for it, a cap on income (without any explanation why people will work as hard when they don’t get paid for it) and a free education (as if they really wanted one — see above!)

The socialistic rhetoric which Vrooman employed 100-plus years ago is almost indistinguishable from that which is heard today among those who want something for nothing. Listen, for instance, to this speech from 1887 as reported in the Boston Daily Globe. It was titled, “Why are the Toilers Poor and the Idlers Rich?”

Vrooman told his audience of 4,000 on the Boston Commons, “The workers build great houses and palaces that the idlers live in, while they must be content with a cheap shanty or a crowded tenement... We cannot have the benefit of the wealth we have created; we know it is by some trick we are kept out of it, and the object of this meeting is to find out how it is done. The wealth of the world is robbed from the producers, and wasted and squandered by idlers.”

Or — as we have it today — the 99 percent are doing all the work, and the 1 percent are just unfairly appropriating that which does not belong to them.

Except, fortunately, we have the very instructive historic example of just what happens when wealth winds up in the hands of a socialist do-gooder like Mr. Vrooman. Time after time, Vrooman convinced wealthy people to help out the 99 percent by investing or lending or giving away their money to further one of Vrooman’s schemes. And time after time, Vrooman left town with nothing to show for his dream of economic equality except an opportunity to learn from his mistakes. Alas, he never took advantage of that opportunity.

There is certainly a lot for the rest of us to learn though — starting with the fact that socialism doesn’t work, and never has. Nor does it ever seem to stray far from the impulse to violence and intimidation.

The Boston Globe, writing about Vrooman shortly before his death, noted that “Mr. Vrooman first came into prominence when the Chicago anarchists threw the bomb in Haymarket Square [in 1886]. He was then a poorly clad youth, and gained public notice by protesting against the convictions of Spies, Parsons, Lingg and others. Vrooman was arrested several times for incendiary speeches in Kansas City, Mo., and St. Joseph.”

Interesting, the Haymarket affair is a nexus of various socialist and revolutionary movements in America. The protest where the bomb was thrown at the Chicago police occurred on May 4, 1886, and later inspired the May Day protests which continue to this day under the banner of socialism and communism. Eight police officers died in the violence that ensued after the bomb exploded, and ultimately four of the anarchists who were at the protest were convicted and executed for inciting the violence even though none of them had thrown the bomb.

Vrooman was just 17 at the time of the Haymarket riots, and was 18 a year later when he spoke in New York in September 1887 at a rally organized to protest the death sentences for the anarchists.

“These men who have seen so much misery and such outrages may have been hasty and made mistakes, but their only crime was free speech... It is a conspiracy of the ruling classes to put down the laboring classes. They are going to hang seven representatives of labor in Chicago,” The World newspaper quoted Vrooman as telling a crowd of “fellow wage slaves.”

The outrage Vrooman expressed is not unlike that which was heard last week when police fired non-lethal rounds at an Occupy Oakland crowd to disperse them after they refused to leave a park when ordered to do so. When one of the protesters was seriously injured, the cry of police brutality went up, as it always does from those who provoke the police by breaking the law.

Vrooman’s words could have been uttered in regard to either event, and as intended they still have the effect of bringing sympathy on those who broke the law. Yet the “99 percent” does not have a free pass to do whatever they will. They must be held accountable lest we fall from the freedom of a lawful society to the bondage of lawlessness.

Which reminds me: It was Bill Ayers and the Weathermen revolutionary socialists who blew up the statue of a Chicago policeman in Haymarket Square in 1969 just before the “Days of Rage” protests. Yep, that Bill Ayers. The tentacles of socialism are long and deadly, and if you follow the clues from 1969 to 2011, you don’t need a Weatherman to know which way the wind blows.

Vrooman, Ayers, the Weathermen, Occupy Wall Street and the anarchists in Haymarket Square all have one thing in common. They want to impose economic equality on a world that uses inequality as the fuel that drives us to success. Inequality, not bailouts and handouts, is what provides us the opportunity for growth. In a world where everything is equal, or where everything is easy, there is no reason to achieve anything. Imagine no incentives. It’s easy if you try.

Occupy Wall Street is the ultimate lost cause — not because it cannot win, but because if it does, we are all lost.