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 All but four, though, have repealed them, most recently Saez’s and Zucman’s homeland of France.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.
