The Occupy Wall Street movement is a living, pulsating kaleidoscope of intellectual inconsistency that should dazzle even lefty journalists. Pointing out the inconsistencies has watchmen on the right working overtime but there is a singular contradiction that we have yet to hear articulated clearly.

Redistribution of wealth on the scale desired by the intellectual vagrants, squatting in Zuccotti Park has proven historically, to be quite challenging. While it’s easy enough to pay-off the idlers whose carnal appetite for security and consumption outweighs their morality, it seems there’s always a troublesome remnant with an innate sense of self-respect getting in the way.

Just ask President Obama who recently had to accept that even though 99% of the country apparently support the OWS movement, Congress including the Democrat controlled Senate would not. The President has had to resort, again, to regulatory fiat to keep the government growing in the direction of greater redistribution by trying to further manipulate the market for mortgages and student loans.

Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr. laid bare the frustration of progressives at having to wait for democracy when he told the Daily Caller earlier this month, that President Obama should simply assume power to grant full employment for 15 million job seekers. That’s one person wielding an awful lot of economic power. OWS is troubled by a great many things . . . but not the prospect of something approaching totalitarian control of the economy. It seems that if the 1% wielding power is Kathleen Sebelius or Steven Chu or Eric Holder or even George Soros, we’re good.

I have yet to see a journalista asking any of the squatters who should decide how the economic pie gets divided, perhaps because that would expose the obvious hypocrisy. Far more troubling is the historical fact that redistribution of income, of the kind we the 99% are apparently asking for, has required coercion.

Yeah, the greedy folks whose understanding of human nature compels a more independent world view, have sometimes been slow to come around. Vexing troublesome elements of the citizenry, like the Tea Party, have been unable to appreciate the merits of social justice or whatever term has been in vogue for taking money from a producer and giving to a non-producer. Their dogged pursuit of self-reliance and (cover your ears children) prosperity, are a real buzz-kill and sometimes the only way to coax them along is a little coercion.

Coercion is a must because equality is entirely unnatural.  We all know there are lots of reasons we don’t end up at the same place in life and in a capitalist society that means income inequality. While most Americans appreciate the principle of a social safety net, they would recoil at the idea of “equality” enforced by violence. That’s why the advocates of wealth redistribution really abhor the distribution of authority. It’s so much harder to sell a thousand local governments on a principle that offends reason and morality. Consolidation is leverage.

In order to realize the grand ideal of “equality” you have to get all the power and control squeezed down into as small a group as possible. It has to be a really small group something on the order of say . . . one percent. In truth, the OWS crowd is as comfortable with the idea of 1% control as they are with the idea of destroying public property or living in filth and squalor.   What discomfits them so terribly is the idea that the 1% are the result of natural selection of the social or economic variety; competition is anathema.

Deep down, perhaps we can all understand the impulse towards the kind of imaginary security the OWS claims to advocate but the inconvenient truth about income redistribution is hard to avoid. Greece may yet be the end of the European Union and a major financial stumbling block for the United States.  In fact, Europe has devolved closer to 99% coercing the 1% with some grip on reality to continue their slide into oblivion. The agreements reached this week do nothing to change the underlying cultural drivers of catastrophe. History provides far more sobering examples of 1% coercing the 99% towards “equality.” It rarely ends with everyone living a life of casual, urban, self-absorption indefinitely. Mao and Stalin contributed to the deaths of tens of millions of people and a vast tidal wave of human suffering that continues to ripple today. Closer to home we have the continuing tragedy of Cuba.

Despite the profound dishonesty of the media’s coverage of OWS, they still represent a fringe that has been with us since the beginning and not a material threat. What is to be feared, greatly, is the long, slow decline of personal understanding and resolve that seems to take hold in prosperous and secure societies. Whether they understand reality or not, a majority of Greeks, Italians and others are committed to living a lie no matter the cost to others. It’s hard to understand the value judgment that decries greed on the part of unscrupulous bankers but celebrates the kind of collective greed that is destroying a continent and threatening us all. Just one more inconsistency.

President Obama addressed the United Nations General Assembly today with the usual kaleidoscope of utopian aspiration and misunderstanding.

For example, the idea that the end of war is social justice for everybody. “The men and women who built this institution understood that peace is more than just the absence of war. A lasting peace — for nations and for individuals — depends on a sense of justice and opportunity, of dignity and freedom. It depends on struggle and sacrifice, on compromise, and on a sense of common humanity.” Ergo his admonition for NASA to bolster the self-esteem of the Muslim world. In fact, the only historical deterrent to war is the threat of overwhelming force. the sure knowledge in the heart of every would be tyrant or sponsor of terror that we will in the words of President Kennedy “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”

The President suggested that the tide of war is receding” and we are poised to end these wars from a position of strength.” In reality, we are drawing down our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, before achieving a stable peace. We are contemplating major cuts to our defense budget so that we can support a bloated and increasingly clumsy entitlement state. In the “war” against a dime-store dictator in Libya, we followed the French and the British.

To pivot away from another awkward foreign policy blunder, the President was however forced to utter this truth that says so much about the irrelevance of the United Nations; “a genuine peace can only be realized between the Israelis and the Palestinians themselves.”

Some bit of demonstrable truth. Sovereign nations are and must be responsible for their fate and the billions of dollars we contribute to the United Nations serve primarily to maintain a class of lazy and ineffectual Marxists who apologize for the most egregious offenders. Israel’s continued existence owes nothing to the United Nations; quite the contrary.

Our continued support for the charade in Turtle Bay is evidence that things are not changing for the better as the President suggests.

Bill Richardson was disappointed and surprised about his treatment at the hands of the totalitarian regime in Cuba who refused to let him take their big bargaining chip home playing the role of conquering hero.

Liberals expect benevolence and virtue from everyone except white, middle class Christians, even recognized state sponsors of terror like the Castros.

Human Rights groups report significant recent increases in detentions and violence against dissidents. The Castros have a 50 year track record of murderous, repressive rule that has impoverished 11 million people.

Cuba’s refusal to release Alan Goss was described as a stunning reversal. Really? Stunning? Stunning like North Korea’s proficient and longstanding abuse of American diplomats, Iraq’s contravention of eleventeen dozen United Nations resolutions, Pakistan’s decisions to share classified US military equipment with the Chinese, Russian military aggression in former Soviet satellites? The list goes on.

It seems that no amount of brutal experience will ever persuade diplomatic savants like Governor Richardson that dictators and terrorists don’t see the world the same way as middle Americans. Cuba is a profound tragedy, not a threat. But this interaction is representative of the kind of thinking that does represent the only potentially fatal threat to America.

A stone’s throw from our own coast, a pair of geriatric thugs are holding an American citizen because the issue is not what we can do, it’s what we are willing to do. That’s something people like Fidel and Raul Castro understand with savage clarity. It’s a truth we need to embrace to protect ourselves from threats external and internal. It’s a truth which could prevent people like Governor Richardson from wandering through life in a perpetual state of bewildered shock.