I put something together recently commenting on the Occupy movement. A somewhat different version of it was printed Saturday, Dec. 10, 2011, in the London (Ont.) Free Press. The following is my preferred version:

By Peter Riley

It seems as if every decade or so, a popular movement flickers to life and spreads like fire in dry grass. The cause may seem frivolous at first, and sometimes that may be exactly what it is. Or it may come to be seen by the majority of society as serious and worthwhile, and become public policy.

Let me glance over a few from my own lifetime. There was environmentalism, which seemed, when I was a kid, to consist almost entirely of a book by Rachel Carson called The Silent Spring, about the harm of pesticides. Environmentalism has a seat at the table now.

There was feminism, once usually referred to somewhat snidely as "women's lib." In the early '70s, when I was a young newspaper copy editor, I had to write a headline for a wire–service story about "himmicanes" and "herstory."

The story was intended to be sarcastically humorous – “Look what these crazy women are up to now." Write such a story today and you'd be out on your ear.

In the late '80s, glasnost and perestroika (please don't ask me to translate) led to the tumbling of the Berlin Wall, the breakup of the Soviet Union and, today, some sort of parody of democracy in Russia. There have been the Prague Spring, Tiananmen Square, and 2011's Arab Spring.

Health and safety concerns have changed attitudes about smoking and drunk driving. Legislation and behaviour have shifted accordingly. These things have happened in half a century – a blink of the historic eye.

So now we have the Occupy Autumn, that peculiar phenomenon that started with Occupy Wall Street, and has now spread around the world with all the rapidity of the Arab Spring.

What is it? What does it want? Will it emerge in time as a social cause with all the force of people's struggles for democracy around the world? Or will it just fade away? It's too soon to know.

The movement is hampered by lack of leadership and an apparent failure to enunciate clear goals. It's also being dogged by constitutionally dubious police raids.

And now, with winter soon upon us, Occupy may fade away, at least in northern climes; and we'll have to wait for spring to see if it revives.

The Occupiers have been well–behaved and nonviolent. They aren't rage–filled anarchists and the public doesn't read them that way. It would seem they deserve a fair hearing.

But do the Occupiers in fact have a common theme and purpose? What you hear about most often is "the 1%" and "the 99%." This sets bells clanging in my head. It brings to mind Leonard Cohen's poem/song Everybody Knows. This is how it begins:

Everybody knows that the dice are loaded

Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed

Everybody knows that the war is over

Everybody knows the good guys lost

Everybody knows that the fight was fixed

The poor stay poor, the rich get rich

That's how it goes

Everybody knows

I've long felt that in free–market economies, big money uses its power trying to satisfy an insatiable greed, has great success, and the rest of us make do with scraps from the table. While I believe capitalism is the most workable economic engine we can choose, I feel it contains an inherent evil: wanton greed.

This can lead to a relatively tiny segment of people possessing inordinate wealth, and money is power. Politicians dance to its tune and the Occupiers see it.

In my belief, an informed public, through its elected representatives, has a democratic right to exert a steady counter–pressure to restrain the influence and, indeed, to check wealth, of the money elite.

The richest 1% of the world's population owns 40% of the total household wealth, while the bottom half of the world makes do with barely 1%, according to research by the Helsinki–based World Institute for Development Economics Research in 2006.

What's going on here?

A year ago, the left–leaning Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives wrote, "The 246,000 privileged few who rank among the country's richest 1% took almost a third (32%) of all growth in incomes between 1997 and 2007."

The report also said that the last time Canada's economic elite took in a similarly large share of income was in the 1920s – just before the Crash.

The middle class are the people who spend the money that drives the economy, and the middle class is declining in North America and elsewhere. According to a recent Stanford University study, about 44% of U.S. families now live in middle–income neighbourhoods, down from 65% in 1970.

The middle class shrank in the 1920s too, helping spur the Great Depression. With all that's going on in world finance today, all this is rather ominous, isn't it?

The richest individual in the world, according to the March 2011 Forbes magazine list, is Bill Gates, with $56 billion. (Carlos Slim of Mexico and his family together topped the list with $74 billion.) I don't think Gates is "worth" $56 billion. I don't think he "earned" it. No one could. Einstein wasn't "worth" $56 billion. Neither was Galileo. Neither was Mozart.

It seems to me that $5.9 million would be a fair reward for a creative entrepreneur like Gates. But that would be one 10-thousandth of what he actually has.

I believe what we need to do is set a cap on the net worth anyone can possess. This could be done perfectly legally, through taxation. And perfectly morally as well, in my belief. Set the limit you like. I’ll name a figure: $10 million. Is there anyone who can`t scrape by on that?

This is the old idea of redistribution of wealth through tax policy. The rich got too big a slice of the pie to begin with, so take some of it back. The list of good uses this wealth could be put to is legion.

The removal of wild excesses of wealth could do much to heal politics, as politicians came to be true servants of the public, not compromised by the sway of the rich.

 I know this idea sounds outlandish at first, but what`s wrong with it? I offer it to the Occupy movement as a main first objective.

I offer them a slogan too: “Tax it back.”