Foreign Entanglements

I’ve been wondering where Socialist POTUS-candidates Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have been getting the foundation for their Lefty economic policy proposals because, frankly, neither strikes me as much of an intellectual heavyweight — Warren’s tokenist Harvard Law degree notwithstanding.

I wonder no more, and the headline to this article alone tells us why:

Two French economists from Berkeley advising Warren and Sanders on wealth tax

As the expression goes, it’s hard to see how you could fit much more annoying shit into a single sentence.  As for their economic philosophy, we have this:

There are competing explanations for the rise in inequality. Those on one side argue that wealth concentration is natural as a result of globalization, technology gains, and economic growth, which give enormous rewards to the smartest, innovative, and most hardworking people. Drastically increasing tax rates, they say, would discourage innovation and hurt the economy.
The other camp sees rising inequality as unfair, immoral, and a threat to society.
Saez and Zucman are firmly in the second camp.

Saez, 46, and Zucman, 32, are both originally from France and have each worked in the past with Thomas Piketty, the famous French economist whose research on wealth and income inequality made him a best-selling author.

Ah, jeez.  Piketty’s work is horribly slanted — it’s full of the Chomskyist research “methodology” so eloquently debunked by Bill Whittle, in that by taking a shovelful of beach sand and extracting a few black grains and discarding the rest, one can “prove” that all beaches contain not white, but black sand.  Ditto Piketty, whose oh-so data-driven proposals for taxing wealth (as opposed to just income) were initially latched onto by many European governments:

So far, at least 15 European countries have tried wealth taxes. All but four, though, have repealed them, most recently Saez’s and Zucman’s homeland of France.

As we saw recently with Frogland, when their dotgov imposed more and more restrictions on wealthy Frenchmen, capital and its owners simply fled the country for more tax-hospitable climes.

Which of course means that despite the documented failure of such policies, our own home-grown Lefties like Warren and Sanders are keen to implement them Over Here.

But that’s the Left for you:  never let facts get in the way of theory.  And the Marxist “problem” of “income inequality” has proven to be, well, insoluble short of outright Leninism — confiscation of wealth and murder of an entire economic class (the kulaks) being the hallmarks thereof.  (And for Lenin’s “kulaks”, read our modern-day Leninists’ “gun owners” as the disposable class, cf. Beto and Swalwell’s statements thereof.)

Which should tell you all you need to know about Warren and Sanders.  It’s not just your guns they’ll confiscate:  it’s your pension fund, your property and your livelihood as well.

Prove me wrong.

8 comments

  1. “It’s not just your guns they’ll confiscate…”
    =======
    Right.
    Ultimately, they will own everything about you, including your body. To use and dispose of as they see fit. The only question is, how much tyranny will you tolerate before you start slitting throats. Everybody has their own custom tailored thresholds for tolerance. Mine happens to be very low. Dangerously so. As Callahan said so long ago, “A man has to know his limitations.”, and I learned mine as a teenager, that’s why I confine myself to a remote isolated location with little contact with people. It doesn’t take much to set me off and if I ever had to deal with a Seattle or Portland or political type there is no telling of the carnage.

  2. I’m currently reading “Atlas Shrugged” and the line about “… inequality as unfair, immoral, and a threat to society” could almost word-for-word have been lifted from the novel.

  3. Another example that the two main pillars of Marxism in all of it’s malignant mutations are Greed and Envy. Everything else is theological debating points and psychobabble to serve the greed and envy of it’s cultists.

  4. Ah, yes. This year’s version of “The reason Socialism has always failed in the past is because they didn’t have the right people in charge.”

    What’s left unsaid is that with Socialism, the “right people” never get to be in charge.

  5. There is another explanation for inequality. Let’s look at a hypothetical example.

    William Clay Ford, Jr. is the executive chairman of Ford Motor Company. Let’s say that Congress decides that Mr. Ford is not paying his fair share and adds a 1 million dollar surcharge to his taxes. Mr Ford is aghast and of course complains. The legacy media publishes vacuous op-eds basically saying “Right on! Make the rich pigs pay!” but A funny thing happens. Everything related to Ford goes up an ever so slight amount. Car prices & service costs at Ford dealers increase a dollar or two. Everything hauled on trucks, not just Ford trucks, goes up a penny. A few more automakers are laid off as more parts are off-shored.

    Come April 15th, Mr. Ford writes the check but where did he get the money? He got it from you and me. We paid the tax. Mr. Ford was just the tax collector. This is not a bug but rather a feature of progressive income taxes. Companies and individuals who collect taxes also get to keep a percentage for their “labor”. Mr. Ford collected 1.5 million dollars to pay that million dollar surcharge.

    Something else that few people think about is that progressive taxes concentrate the collection of taxes into a small percentage of elites; just 3% of the population pays about half of our income taxes. Since this group controls so much tax revenue, they can ask for special favors from the government. Some might call this crony capitalism. Others might call it corruption. No matter. You and I are paying for it.

    Politicians tolerate this situation because it also conceals how much we are really paying in taxes. Also, the 3% can pretty much make or break any politician. So the politicians go along.

  6. I am still chuckling over the headline that mentions “French economists”. That’s enough information right there.

  7. WCF jr. Has a Net worth that fluctuates around 1.4 Billion and his compensation package from FORD was close to $14 million then add in all his other income sources, his total income was easily north of $50 Million, so adding another million to his Tax bill would only result in his team of Tax lawyers and accountants spending more time re-arranging things so his taxes are pretty much that same. His bigger problem is that Ford stock is down 50% over the past 4 years whereas even Boeing has more than doubled in the past 4 years.

    But yes, the bigger point is that the very rich are different in that they can make adjustments to their income and sources of wealth much faster than the political system can change the rules. so they are always ahead of the game. ” Tax the rich” too much and they simply move as Connecticut recently discovered.

    But then the politicians have already spent the money they thought they were getting ( but didn’t ) so now they have to find some other source. Got a Mirror ???

    So just remember, when some clown screams ” Tax the Rich ” that means you ( and not them ).

  8. To quote the British economist George Harrison:

    Let me tell you how it will be
    Here’s one for you nineteen for me

    It’s quite a specific reference. When Harrison wrote that in the 60s, the Beatles found themselves in the most asinine of UK tax brackets – with 20 shillings to the British pound, the Crown was taking 19 of them. 95% baby!

    Me mum was born & raised on Maui, where I’ve spent a great deal of time. I’ve been by Harrison’s estate there. I suspect that tax bracket had a lot to do with why he bought that place; with why John Lennon famously settled in NYC. Like a shit ton of high-earning Brits at the time, they bailed on the Fatherland to evade those breathtakingly punitive taxes. If only Bernie had been there to advise them how “delighted” they should have been to grab their ankles. Because Big Bro will ALWAYS be generous with the lube.

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