Reducing wealth and income inequality is an outcome, not a tangible goal. It's the same as ending police violence against black people. That is actually a more tangible goal because that can be directly controlled by the government. It also had no shortage of support for the "donor class." Yet BLM was still ineffective because it still lacked focus.

To the kind of left-wing populist involved in things like Occupy Wall Street, reducing wealth and income inequality is the tangible goal that they believe achieves the outcomes they want. Their thinking seems to be roughly like this: there is a fixed amount of wealth in the economy that is sufficient for all ordinary people to live a good life, but the super-wealthy have siphoned off much of that wealth due to their greed and that's why ordinary people are suffering, and the only solution to that is to forcibly redistribute that stolen wealth back to the people. Any attempts to make things more complicated than this, any talk about rising tides lifting all boats or suggestion it won't work, is just a propaganda trick from the super-rich.

The "rising tide" meme never made much sense to me. The economy is not like the ocean. A rising ocean affects all boats equally, but a rising economy does not affect all participants equally. The gains from rising economies tend to be disproportionately captured by the already-wealthy, and the losses from falling economies tend to be disproportionately borne by the poor.

The wealthy in a free market get that way by creating wealth, not transferring it from poor people.

> It did have clear goals - “we are the 99%”. It addressed wealth and income inequality and money in politics and it didn’t have a leadership head for the same reason Antifa doesn’t - they are collectives against hierarchal societies. They operated on loose consensus and because of these principals I agree it was weak. But their message was clear.

While that may have been retroactively applied to it, I got the sense that it was a movement for college kids to cut class and get high all day, commingling with their female peers. Funnily enough, my economics professor at the time asked one of the protestors what their views on the macroeconomy were, and the dude was so stoned he launched into a tirade about aliens or something equally nonsensical. It was certainly a cultural movement, but let's not make it seem like it was some large grassroots movement that united Americans all across the country to take down government and corporate corruption.

> I got the sense that it was a movement for college kids to cut class and get high all day,

Were you there? When the system collapsed and millions of people lost their homes and their jobs? These were the people that were there. Your revisionist account is precisely what the ruling class would like to perceive it to be. And now cast them off as populist weirdo losers. Is it a coincidence we have since entered an opium epidemic, reduced lifespan, and elected Trump?

Honestly I think they were there to see a head roll and no head did. But to cast them as stoned idiots is completely wrong. I’m happy your professor who uncritically slurp on made you feel good though, as you wiped your mouth.

To be fair. "Fix wealth and income inequality" as a goal is a bit like Michael Scott's 45 day-45 point plan to save Dunder Mifflin. "Ok, day 45 company saved. Day 44. Go."

Yes, we need to do that. From here to there however, is a long and winding road with many obstacles.