House of Eratosthenes

Michael Barone, Why Liberals Like Taxing the Wealthy. Boy, did I ever get excited when I saw the first paragraph, I’ve been wondering about this for a long time.

I have long been puzzled by the enthusiasm with which many young liberal bloggers cheer on proposals to raise tax rates on high earners. I can understand why they might favor them, but not why they seem to invest so much psychic energy in the issue.

Note the fine and subtle distinction. This is why the question goes unanswered. You can be for something…as a matter of obligation, or prerequisite necessity involved in supporting some other thing closer to your interests because the two issues are inextricably connected. Or, you can be like a little kid wanting a particular toy for Christmas. So there the push for a specific proposal, and then there is the zeal behind the push. This is about the zeal. It is there, it is widespread, it is sincere, it is intense. What gives?

Lefties want taxes to be higher. Young lefties who’ve never worked a day in their lives, want these taxes to be higher. These assurances are made that the “taxes will only be raised on those who make more than 250k (or 200k)” and they believe this uncritically, but they don’t even seem to be interested in that part of it. They don’t seem interested in who’s spared, they don’t seem to be interested in how much money rolls into the Treasury, or where it goes afterward.

The whole thing looks like a zeal for destruction. Like the bad guy on the second-to-last page of a glossy comic book, “I don’t care if I live so long as you die.”

Barone goes on to note this, himself…

One argument for higher rates is that increased revenues will reduce the federal budget deficit. But do liberal bloggers really care all that much about budget deficits? These same people often rue the fact that the Obama Democrats didn’t plow an additional $1 trillion into their stimulus package.

I think the answer to the puzzle can be found in a remark Barack Obama made during the 2008 fall campaign — a remark that seemed to go mostly unnoticed.

ABC’s Charlie Gibson asked candidate Obama if he would raise capital gains taxes even if, as in the past, that brought in less revenue to the federal government.

Yes, said Obama. “I would look at raising the capital gains tax for purposes of fairness.”

Ponder that answer for a moment. A candidate for president — president now — said he wants to take more money from people who earned it even though doing so would produce less money for the government.

Stranger and stranger. Barone provides an answer toward the end:

Higher tax rates on high earners, even if they produce less revenue, are an attempt to centralize power in government and to limit the autonomy and countervailing power of individuals in the voluntary sector.

Which is why the liberal bloggers cheer them on. And why they eagerly join the Obama White House in demonizing the Koch brothers, who donate large sums to conservative causes. (Disclosure: I have spoken at two Koch conferences and was reimbursed for travel expenses.)

The Obama Democrats don’t want their funders like George Soros getting competition from the likes of Charles and David Koch.

Okay, this makes good sense, because these are very simple concepts that can be perceived by a primitive, undeveloped mind, and in the liberal bloggers we’re dealing with primitive, undeveloped minds. That’s not an insult, that is a statement of fact. Really, just read the comment threads over at DailyKOS or ThinkProgress or democrat underground sometime. You’ll see a lot of babbling about “the common good” with little or no actual concern for it.

The primitives have a vision for the very rich, at least, the very rich who fail to support left-wing policy initiatives and causes as George Soros does. It isn’t death and it isn’t obliteration and it isn’t out-and-out elimination from financial existence; but it is elimination from the ranks of the extraordinary. They want the rich to be taken down a peg or two, to become ordinary. Soros and all the rich lefties in Hollywood don’t have to be taken down, they can stay rich and therefore elite and extraordinary.

The liberal bloggers do not agree with Chris Christie that Warren Buffett should shut up and write a check. They would, if they were honest about their motives. But they don’t. This pattern has remained consistent: To a liberal loudmouth, a liberal rich loudmouth can stay as rich as he likes and become even richer, there is no disruption to this delicate proper order of the universe there. It’s quite alright for fellow progressives to cross this barrier into obscene levels of net worth; all others who have so crossed, must be defrocked of their assets and therefore of their position. It has to do with ideology, and financial position.

So they’re like dogs. They are regulating the order of the pack. Content to live out their lives under the tutelage of an alpha male, or several alpha males, but we cannot have a plurality of factions of the alpha males. There needs to be one and only one direction for the pack to be heading.

But another question remains open. One of the few things modern liberalism shares with classic liberalism is its passion for a narrative involving a benevolent revolution. Liberals have always lusted after an event, a re-enactment of the storming of The Bastille. Prior to the event, the entrenched elite power oppresses and exploits the commoners unfairly; you have the revolution, and then all live in freedom and equality.

Their canine re-enforcement of the existing power structure is a direct contradiction to this. They are engaged in a mass group effort to destroy…who? The rich and powerful — rich and powerful who do not think the same way some other rich and powerful people think. So they are essentially carving a statue by destroying every part of a block of marble that does not look like what they want the statue to be. Eliminating resistance. And they’re doing it to eliminate a plurality of directions, so that there can be only one. Laboring toward the singularity by destroying the plurality.

It seems, to me, like their passion is invested in keeping things simple. If we’re all ordinary, save for those who lead us and the leaders all think the way we do, and we think the way they do, then none of us (or very few among us) have any need to engage in critical thought. So ultimately, they are working to simplify thinking…and the specific strain of more complex thinking they are trying to pare down, is revolutionary thinking. Questioning the virtue, the correctness, and perhaps ultimately the fitness, of those in charge. It is a direct contradiction toward what a real “liberal” is supposed to be.

And yet, when they see the rich people who do things to stay rich and get richer, things that actually provide needed products and services to other people…all of a sudden, they’re good little revolutionaries again. The entrenched power structure has to be overthrown, grrrr! It’s like, if you’re a rich person engaged in trade, which helps other people along with yourself, you’ve got to go, but if you’re a pure parasite then you’re alright. Investors? Well, it all seems to come down to where your investments are, or who you support.

My tentative theory: They approach adulthood and they become aware of two power structures, one commercial and one academic. Let’s face it, you can be very young and very dim and this split will still not escape your notice…and, the left-leaning young people are simply responding to incentive, making a choice about which power structure to support based on which one will demand less work out of them.

It is a theory in the process of being formed, and I’m not sure how much faith I can place in it. But they do all seem to share a hostility toward the thought of: There are contributions made by everyone, it’s done on a cycle, sooner or later the rotating arm comes toward your position on the periphery and then you’ve got to do some good, hard, old-fashioned work. That does seem to be the part that arouses special loathing out of them. Perhaps I owe an apology toward the harder-working dogs, for comparing passionate young liberal occupiers & bloggers to the canine set. These kids more closely resemble the rodent-doggies that are carried around in purses. You know. The really noisy ones.

On my good (charitable) days, I agree with a lot of this.

On my bad days, I suspect the answer is simpler, and much, much scarier: Liberalism is Daddy Issues writ large; those defined as “the rich” are Daddy.

This explains the puerile nature of liberal “arguments,” anyway. For instance, the other day I was having a set-to with a libtard at Prof Mondo’s place. I said (I’m paraphrasing), “you seem to be asserting that Republicans are actually, actively, consciously trying to kill off homeless people”…. and genius agreed.

That’s not how you discuss public policy; that’s the kind of thing you yell at your Dad when you’re fifteen and he makes you stay home and do algebra homework instead of driving you to the homecoming dance.

Soros, Buffet, etc. are, on my theory, the one “cool dad” in every neighborhood that buys his kid beer, admits to smoking pot, etc. They’re not cool because they’re leftists; they’re leftists because they’re cool. Consider, for instance, that though all good liberals are required to hate Tim Tebow, Kurt Warner, etc., nobody ever complains that they don’t pay enough taxes. If Eminem, say, suddenly came out as a closet conservative, liberals would very publicly hate him, but a) so long as he didn’t start rapping about Reagan, they’d still buy his records, and b) they’d never lump him in with “the rich” who aren’t paying “their fair share,” even though he’s obscenely overpaid by any rational standard. He’s exempt because he’s “cool,” the one thing liberals long to be…. and are desperately afraid they aren’t.

Ok, I’m mostly pulling this out of my ass. But something one of your commenters once said (forgive me, I can’t remember who) sounds truer than 99.8 of all the political analysis I’ve ever read: “Liberals are people who spend their entire lives trying to make high school turn out right.”
- Severian | 03/01/2012 @ 09:14
Taxing the rich is a way of hiding how much we pay to gov’t.Taxing the grocer raises the price of groceries: when the landlord pays his real estate tax, where did the money come from? People who pay no income tax because of low income,are making their payments second hand, but they are paying.
- kermitt | 03/01/2012 @ 11:23
[…] seem so singularly motivated by raising taxes (on other people) as against anything else. However, mkfreeberg has basically written the piece I wanted to write so you can read that and I can save the […]
- Higher Taxes Help The One-Dimension Project « Rhymes With Cars & Girls | 03/01/2012 @ 11:25
“Liberals are people who spend their entire lives trying to make high school turn out right.”

Philmon?

Good stuff, Morgan.

Though trying to figure out shit that doesn’t make sense is but an operation in futility. Yea, yea, “know thy enemy” and all that, OK. But at the end of the day where does that get us?

Maybe we should look in the mirror and try to figure out why our principles and values, which are blatantly and historically correct, are not reaching or resonating, at least on a continual basis , with a majority of Americans.

How the fuck is it that almost 50% of our fellow Americans still approve of Barry? When 30% of the population is considered Liberal? Seriously, what would this country have to look like before they disapproved of him and/or that Liberal “fairness” philosophy?

Please excuse me, I’m just tired and perplexed and bewildered as to what is transpiring in this country right now. I could give a shit about psychoanalyzing the leeches and parasites as we threaten them if they suck one more ounce of blood, just one more…OK, now you’ve done it, one more…this time I’m serious…all the while perpetually holding the can of insecticide inches above them.

We’re so fucked, more than most realize, even with a 2012 Republican presidency (no, I’m not one of those “they’re all the same” poo flingers) I don’t care about “why” anymore, just about what we’re gonn’a do about correcting it all.

Carry on, done ranting.
- tim | 03/01/2012 @ 11:53
Well, we saw the answer to that with the Occupy movement, didn’t we?

College kids who’ve had every bill paid by mommy & stepdaddy so they didn’t have to worry about it. They dutifully toddled over to the HR department, or the recruiter who came to them on campus, dropped their cute resume loaded up with “excellent communication skills” and “graduating with a major in [blank] studies”…and got told no. A liberal is born.

Conservatives are born after the hire event, when they get the first paycheck and scream those magical words, “Who the fuck is this FICA asshole??”
- mkfreeberg | 03/01/2012 @ 12:00
Well said, Morgan.

Sev – what happened to your blog? I rather miss it…
- cylarz | 03/01/2012 @ 23:51
Cylarz,

a combo of not enough time to really think things out, a few family setbacks, and living under the omnipresent surveillance of a deep-blue hellhole made it more trouble than it was worth (no doubt I’m paranoid, but I have the kind of job, and work among the kind of people, who would definitely get one fired for crimethink). I might go back to it with TOR etc. if I have some more time to write decent posts, but for now I guess I’m going to have to confine my rants to the generous suffrage of our host.
- Severian | 03/02/2012 @ 14:23

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The Question Remains OpenThursday, March 1st, 2012

The Question Remains Open
Thursday, March 1st, 2012