This article about Spain’s public health care system demonstrates what happens when the government starts running out of money. Of course, that couldn’t happen here.

The German people feel that it is not fair that they should be asked to pay for the bloated public sectors of nations where tax avoidance is an Olympic event. The Greeks feel that they should not be asked to take a 40% paycut so that a bunch of rich Germans don’t have to bail out their banks. Berlusconi no doubt feels that he is entitled to keep a job to which he was duly elected. You can try to explain to all of them why their sense of outrage is rather beside the point in the face of a looming financial explosion which is going to make everyone much worse off if it reaches critical mass. You can also go home and try to explain this to your microwave, for all the good it will do. As anyone who has ever spoken to a five year old knows, the sense of fairness is one of the most primal and intractable cognitive instincts we have. In the best of times, it takes years to change public opinion about what is fair. These are not the best of times, and we do not have years. I am very much afraid that the euro zone is about to plunge us into phase two of the global financial crisis–and that as with the Great Depression, phase two may be even worse than the dismal years we’ve just endured. In search of fairness, we may all get a lot more justice than any of us really wants.

The miserable reality today is not that the many are doing worse because our capitalist system is set up to fleece them for the benefit of the few. They are doing worse because the economy went through a cataclysm from which it has yet to recover. When the economy crashes, it’s those with the least education, fewest options and slimmest resources who suffer most. That’s true, by the way, in noncapitalist societies as well as capitalist ones. In either, people who have done nothing wrong often suffer. At moments like this, it’s not surprising that many Americans would resent the wealthy and feel the urge to punish them. But the OWS demand for action against them is the equivalent of honking your horn when you’re stuck in a traffic jam. It makes a lot of noise, without getting you anywhere.

Close examination suggests that the single biggest difference between those at or above the top tenth percentile of the income distribution and those below the 50th percentile is that the former have a degree or two while the latter, typically, do not. Technological change and global competition have made it impossible for American workers to get good jobs without strong skills.

The economy is barely growing and nine percent of the American people have no jobs. Is a new tax on Christmas trees the best President Obama can do?

Demographics seems a more plausible culprit: people want to stockpile because everyone is trying to set things up so they can later retire for thirty years with less than two workers in the workforce for every retiree.

They are probably in bigger trouble than the European periphery.

There are two main lessons to take away from this. First, none of us is ever really “on our own,” because the market system is a social system. Second, politicians cannot use taxes to attain any particular set of goals for income “fairness” because the market system is extraordinarily complex and adaptable, and politicians are themselves anything but omniscient. An omniscient and omnipotent authority could impose some notion of social justice. The reality we face is that social justice is both arbitrary and practically unenforceable. These two lessons have important implications.

So just who are those top 1 percent of Americans that we’re all supposed to hate?