Somehow, in libertarian Peter Schiff’s vigorous and commendable defense of capitalism, he missed two crucial things, which, it seems, his fairly ignorant but feisty OccupationWallStreet interlocuters sensed, even if they too did not articulate it:
1. If capitalism is a moral system (which it is), then Peter Schiff is wrong to defend the system we have today as capitalistic. Clearly it is not.
If Schiff was defending an ideal abstraction that he called capitalism that is not yet in place, he missed making that clear.
2. If OWS is wrong to deny the property rights of those who acquired them legally, then, Peter Schiff commits another error, one of omission. He omitted any reference to the imperial foreign policy that undergirds the economy and ultimately delegitimizes Schiff’s own claims to his property as unassailable. of course, it also delegitimizes the claims of every other citizen of this country and of the rest of the Anglo-American imperium, as well as all other who profit from empire
But since OWS tried to attack Schiff’s property claims by asserting their own illegitimate claims, he was able to easily and (within that limited frame of reference) correctly refute them.
Thus, the media confrontation, in effect, only produced the familiar propaganda binary:
Welfare Socialism in OWS
Versus
Warfare Capitalism in Schiff
And it did so even though I believe both OWS and Schiff wanted to articulate and plead for the real thing.
With the caveat that I believe violence in self-defense to be justifiable, I offer this from Malcolm X:
“If violence is wrong in America, violence is wrong abroad. If it is wrong to be violent defending black women and black children and black babies and black men, then it is wrong for America to draft us, and make us violent abroad in defense of her. And if it is right for America to draft us, and teach us how to be violent in defense of her, then it is right for you and me to do whatever is necessary to defend our own people right here in this country.”