But what exactly is in this so-called urgent message? According to the N&O, the protesters are upset about “cuts” to education spending, the state’s refusal to accept Medicaid expansion, reductions to unemployment benefits and the Senate’s tax plan.

Unsurprisingly, the N&O and apparently the protesters may be long on dramatic, self-serving grasps at attention, but short on facts.

On education spending, per pupil state allocations for K-12 skyrocketed by 24% in just five years between 2003-4 and 2008-9, a rate that was revealed to be unsustainable when recession hit. But the N&O and the protesters can’t be bothered to look into such facts (not that dumping more money into the public education blob will help anything anyway).

In regard to Medicaid expansion, the N&O makes the claim that “the federal government will pay the cost” for the expansion. Not true. First off, the “federal government” has no money, so it would actually be taxpayers paying the cost for the expansion. More specifically, the state will be responsible for 10% of the additional costs of expansion after a few short years. Estimates project that would cost state taxpayers an additional $1.1 billion from 2014 to 2020 alone. Expansion would also add as many as 600,000 or more new enrollees to the already bloated Medicaid program. That would mark a doubling of Medicaid enrollees in about fifteen years, a time when doctors accepting Medicaid patients has declined. The increase would total about 1.2 million people added to Medicaid. That’s the equivalent of adding the entire population of Wake and Durham counties to a program with declining doctors. Just who does the N&O think these new enrollees will be able to see for medical care? And where does the N&O think the state will come up with an additional $1.1 billion to pay for all of these people to be jammed into waiting rooms across the state?

And then there is the claim that “cuts in unemployment” benefits will be harmful to the economy. How so? Where do they think the money comes from to pay these benefits? It comes out of the pockets of employers, of course. Less money for job creators means fewer jobs created. And then there is the obvious observation that paying people not to work results in more people not working. Does the N&O think paying people not to work benefits the economy? I guess the N&O writers were too busy dusting off the old Peter, Paul and Mary 8-track tape to consider such “extreme” questions.

Lastly, the N&O once again sites the Senate tax plan calculator to claim the plan unfairly benefits high income people while harming the middle class. This ignores of course an analysis examining the usefulness of the data used in the calculator and in turn the way it can skew results. Such calculations also ignore the most important aspect of tax reform: the dynamic effects on the economy as the state attracts more investment and job creation – benefits more concentrated to lower-income households and the unemployed.

The protesters and their cheerleaders at the N&O are welcome to discuss policy differences – just don’t insult us by claiming some moral high ground when you have little understanding of the issues.

On January 18 Town of Chapel Hill Town Manager Roger Stancil –who has never been shy about telling others he has tried to cultivate good relations with occupiers — sent a memo to  Town Council members that sounded like a man who didn’t like what was going on and was ready to change direction.

Moving forward, I plan to ensure that all adopted ordinances and established policies and procedures regulating the use of public spaces and facilities…. are enforced by Town staff to the extent possible.

My translation of Stancil’s memo: Vive le revolucion but hey, someone please take care of the homeless problem.

Occupiers didn’t take kindly to the council’s new stance. Already smarting from being forcibly removed by police for squatting in the Yates Automotive building last November, occupiers issued a statement that included the usual leftist rhetoric:

We reserve the right of citizens to assemble. We reflect the despair, dreams and sentiments of thousands of town residents angry with economic injustice and inequality at local and global levels. Roger Stancil as town manager is attempting to privatize public space with threats of arbitrary enforcement of ordinances that effectively prohibit free speech and assembly. This is a global issue that the Occupy movement organized to confront.

If you’re a good liberal you have to feel for Roger Stancil…Here’s a guy who goes out of his way to let occupiers know he wants to accommodate them. He turns a blind eye to ordinance enforcement only to have the homeless force him into a position of having to “ensure that all adopted ordinances and established polices and procedures regulating the use of public spaces and facilities are enforced by Town staff to the extent possible.”

Is it just me, or aren’t local officials required to enforce laws (local and state) and to uphold the constitutions of North Carolina and the United States? Or in Chapel Hill,  do officials have the option of picking and choosing which ones they’d like to enforce?

For a wider lens on this never-ending saga see here and  here.

Yesterday The Daily Tar Heel, the student newspaper of UNC Chapel Hill posted a video  about the incident.  The video provides a sympathetic view of protestors as well as the unvarnished wisdom of Michal Osterweil (See clip below).  Osterweil a lecturer in Global Studies (What does one do with a degree in Global Studies?) seems to question the right of the building’s owner to defend his property from trespassers. Scary stuff. Watching the far left agitate is bad enough; knowing we’re paying people who advocate such lunacy is even worse.

The article also attempts to describe the mindset of the protesters, as well as some of its supporters and detractors. Among the skeptics of the Occupy movement’s motives and reasoning is your truly:

Conservatives have portrayed the protests as anti-capitalistic and driven by far left-wing forces outside the American mainstream. “The Occupy movement claims to represent the ‘99 percent’ that is allegedly exploited by the ‘1 percent,’ yet these confused protesters rail against free-market capitalism, which is a system based on 1 percent (business owners) serving the needs of 99 percent (consumers) in order to be successful,” said Brian Balfour, director of policy and operations at the Civitas Institute.

In other words, I believe that the protesters have misdirected their understandable frustration. The “1 percent” they demonize refers to the wealthiest one percent who “control” a sizable portion of the nation’s wealth. But as economist George Reisman so capably points out, most of the “wealth” owned by the wealthiest 1 percent consists of means of production. Therefore, that wealth is not selfishly hoarded, but employed to benefit the rest of us through the production of goods and services we desire. These allegedly greedy capitalist increase their wealth by mass producing products that raise the standard of living of the common man.

Clueless politicians like Elaine Marshall and Brad Miller are completely off-base when they say the Occupy protesters are “mad at the right people.”

The protesters should instead focus their angst against the truly powerful 1 percent: the government.

In comparison to the government, the “1 percent” are completely powerless. Business owners will lose their wealth unless they offer goods and services that the rest of us desire. The 99 percent have complete power over the fate of the 1 percent. The exception, of course, is when government gets involved with bailouts, subsidies, protections, etc.

This lesson of power should be crystallized in light of the recent arrest of protesters by armed guards of the state.

Note to protesters:

• Wall Street CEO’s didn’t have the power to arrest you
• Billionaire hedge fund managers didn’t have the power to arrest you
• Exxon Mobil execs didn’t have the power to arrest you
• The Koch brothers or Art Pope didn’t have the power to arrest you

It is the government that has the power to arrest you. It is the political class that truly is the 1 percent with the power to “exploit” and “oppress” you. Without the power of the state, corporations are powerless and completely at the mercy of the “99 percent” for their survival.

• Enact tort reform to control the endless malpractice lawsuits that force doctors to perform unnecessary tests and then pay skyrocketed insurance costs.

The Senate Finance committee’s white paper points out: “Medical malpractice insurance premiums have risen steadily over recent decades, at times increasing an average of 15 percent a year. Some states have seen even more dramatic increases. Pennsylvania, for example, experienced increases ranging from 26 to 73 percent in 2003.”

• Support the creation of a system that will allow people to transfer insurance from job to job. For example, start by extending the length of COBRA benefits and then allow health care exchanges.
• Support the removal of state laws that do not allow insurance companies to compete across state lines.
• Remove excess government mandates that determine what companies must cover and prove to hike up the cost of private health insurance.
• Implement tax reform NOT tax increases: provide tax laws that allow employer-provided health insurance and individually owned health insurance to have the same tax benefits applied equally to both.
• And finally, fight the public option on matters of principle and application. A direct government provision is not the solution and will result in government dissolution and the collapse of the private insurance market.

John Mackey, the co-founder and CEO of Whole Foods Market Inc. wrote the “Whole Foods Alternative to Obamacare” and expands on a few reforms listed above and offers other reforms to consider. Check out his article in the WSJ here. If North Carolina is going to debate the ramifications of Obamacare let’s be sure to offer sustainable, free-market reform solutions and not just angry words.