Do the Occupiers even have a legitimate gripe?

Or, what They don't want you to know about the "class war" and who usually wins it.

As a matter of historical record, we are told to expect to see a history replete with examples of "the rich" exploiting "the middle class" and "the poor". This usually takes the form of a just-so story to explain why the rich are rich and the poor are poor. You have probably heard some version of this story at least once in your life, if not a million times by different people. It is also the very basis of the Occupy movement: the vague notion that those greedy rich people are somehow exploiting us hard-working blue collars.



However, an actual reading of history tells us otherwise: we would rationally predict — and empirically do see repeatedly — that it is vastly more profitable for the state to take the side of the middle class and poor against the rich than vice versa. From the perspective of statecraft, it's vastly preferably to incorporate with the poor to steal from the rich and give to oneself to fund government programs versus incorporating with the rich to steal from the poor. The rich are few, so alienating them does not alienate a large portion of the population, which avoids threatening the legitimacy of the government. The rich are also... rich... meaning that it is fiscally worthwhile to steal from them. The poor have neither of these advantages.

The history of the United States is absolutely no exception to this principle. In 1940, only the richest 7% of Americans paid anything at all in federal income tax. The poorest quintile have basically never paid as much as 5% of their income in tax. Even today (despite a near-infinite amount of propaganda to the contrary) the top 5% of taxpayers actually pay well over half of the tax base, most of the bottom half actually make a profit (EITCs) from their tax returns, and we currently have (and historically almost always have had) a president who is actively hostile to the rich despite being a member himself. Somehow this is spun negatively because the rich "should" pay more taxes by some arbitrary and ever-shifting criterion. Whether they pay their "fair share" is of course entirely a function of who decides what a fair share is.

Moreover, the popularly-reported disaffection with the current wealth distribution in the United States is arguably imaginary. Gallup polls indicate that more than a bare majority of people asked believe the taxes they pay are fair. Indeed, on an international stage this makes perfect sense: Americans pay less taxes than any other major industrialized country, as a percent of GDP: 27% in the US vs 32% in Canada, 34% in Poland, 37% in Russia, 39% in the UK, 41% in Germany, 45% in France, and 49% in Denmark. Indeed, the only European nations that pay a lower percent of GDP in taxes vs the United States are Lithuania, Albania, Belarus, and Croatia.

Combine that with the fact that so many Occupiers and allies are independently wealthy (Kalle Lasn, Michael Moore, Jimmy Hoffa Jr.) or upper-crust trust fund kids (Ruth Milkman found that about 1 out of 3 Occupiers live in a household with an income above $100,000, 2 out of 3 are gainfully employed professionals, and nearly 8 out of 10 have college degrees), and it seems that they are only being indignant by proxy for problems that don't affect them and never did. At best (if they are of the demographic they claim), they're complaining about a group of people who more or less singlehandedly pay for the civil infrastructure that allows them to protest without being killed in the process. At worst they're complete astroturf.