Never got that 99% crap, just sounds like a catchy name with no substance.

What about the middle class that make a comfortable wage and live reasonably well? The upper class people that make 100K+ a year? They aren't part of the 1% because the 1% is supposedly the billionaires of the world. People with hundreds of thousands or even millions in the bank are part of the 99%....I doubt they give two shits about the widening gaps, nor do most middle class families.

Nah, its the lower income families, downright poor, and entitled/delusional youths of today that are the core of this protest, which isn't close to 99% IMO.

without looking up my facts i think it's that the top 1% have ~80% of the worlds wealth. 

..i may have thousands in the bank but i do still care.  that wealth distribution is and healthy long term.  consolidating so much wealth into so few hands is bad.  it is bad because the power distribution is unbalanced like it was in the industrial revolution when workers wages, hours, and working conditions were heavily exploited by the few with power.  workers of that time had to accept bad situations because it was either be exploited or die. 

now don't get me wrong, things aren't that bad right now.  but you don't have to look hard to see the shifting power.  corporate lobbies have an unbelievable amount of political power.  unemployment is on the rise world wide.  the riches few's fortunes increase while the middle/lower class has been very stagnant. 

in short, we are moving to an age where an individual's work/contribution to the world is massively more impactful then it was before.  for example: 1 or 2 guys can sit in room for a few months and create a game that could entertain tens of millions of people for months.  that's a whole different scale then when entertainment was performed 1 roomful of people at a time. it's not bad as in evil in of itself.  but it's not a substainable future, imo.  or at least not a stable future as we will very likely see booms and crashes on an ever larger scale than what happened in 2008.

so yeah, i do care.

Agreed. Only the rich should be allowed to own the means of self protection...

It isn't that vices are terrible things that affect much beyond the people who engage in them. It is the fact that people want to be made "whole" after having engaged in the vices and now the cost is borne through increasingly spendy social programs and health care.

If someone wants to smoke that should be their right. However in the past when they died prematurely or couldn't enjoy life in their later years to the degree they might have been able to do so, it was understood as the cost for having undertaken that action.

Now it is deemed there should be no cost. Society should buy him (or her) a new pair of lungs. If someone is obese and has diabetes, they will likely die much earlier. All the life prolonging actions now though are paid for by society.

Then there is the issue of mandated purchasing of certain types of health plans. I hate to break it to you but the people most likely to go without health care were often young adults and the reason they went without it, well because they didn't need it. In almost all cases they were young and healthy.

So in passing health care legislation what they really want isn't wealth redistribution, but health redistribution. They want the young and healthy to be mandated to start buying something they mostly don't need and to take they money that would have paid off a student loan or bought that first house, and instead use it to buy grandpa's and grandma's health care because Medicare is bankrupt and will be even more so when the hippie baby boomers bring their broke, fat and drug/alcohol abused asses into their retirement years.

I think the whoel world should have a one child limit like China, because the way the population is increasing is very scary.

Some basic reading on the idea of a social contract recommended

Great post.