Do you want an example of pure demagoguery? Well, here it is! Watch Elizabeth Warren appeal to the prejudices and emotions of her crowd.
Her speech is filled with all the lingo in the quiver of any power-hungry firebrand. When democracy becomes a substitute for morality, as it is for Warren, Bernie, and the Squad (AOC and company), such people are free to go out and advocate theft if they can garner a large enough throng. And in this Democratic Party, the rhetoric does. This, the wealth tax, is thievery through the tax code, pure and simple. Her rationale is utterly fantastic and also very frightening. It is frightening not just for its lunacy but for the moral corruption of the masses who buy into it.
Frederic J. Brown/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
A rebuttal to Warren can be found here.
The wealth tax ploy is too easy to take apart, as economists even in the Democratic Party stable (Larry Summers, et al) have done. Fact: you’ll get a small fraction of what you expect. It’s too easy to legally dodge. And if that doesn’t work, simply flee and have your assets electronically transferred to Zurich. Wealth is remarkably portable. Of course, you can attempt to stop the flight with more draconian measures, but then you’re mimicking Maduro, or Lenin, or Stalin, or Mao, or Castro …. Elizabeth, do you really want to go there? Some in the base are certainly hot for it.
I’m reminded of other crusades to stick it to the rich, real or imagined. Let’s take a stroll down memory lane to 1929. The story actually begins in 1906. The farsighted Russian Prime Minister, Pyotr Solypin, starting in 1906, uplifted the peasants by giving them land and thus they became property owners. Some were successful and became richer than others. By October of 1917, a revolution for forced “equality” – that’s what communism and Bolshevism are all about – seized power and would spend the next decade trying to eliminate the so-called “kulaks”, or rich peasants. Many were not so much rich as they simply owned their own land. Stalin had enough of peasant resistance. Party activists and armed cadres descended on the countryside to rile the many less-well-off. They seized land, food, crops, livestock, equipment, and herded peasants into state farms and the gulag. That’s the beginning of the Holodomor, the Ukrainian famine of 1932-33.
What’s interesting about the episode is the requisition squads left no stone unturned. Peasants resisted by hiding all they had, all to no avail. Everything was taken, even the seed grain for next year’s crop. What does this mean? Famine and 50 years of shortages. Warren will have to follow in the footsteps of the lefty activists of 1930’s Russia to realize her anticipated $2.75 trillion windfall. It’ll be a replay of 1930’s Russia. Capital will be hidden or flee with the same devastating effects on our country. Warren has company of the sort nobody should relish.
As in the October Revolution, Warren and company are offering “equality” through a series of massive wealth transfers. The “equality” will come in the form of freebies offered up to the alleged dispossessed. It’s a promise with a sordid past. Beware America, she plans to revisit the horror on us and our progeny.
RogerG