By Kevin D. Williamson
Tuesday, October 26, 2021
One of the
many awful things about our tax debate — and our tax system — is its
infantilization of the American people and its degradation of citizenship. A
tax system that is designed to fund the needful things the federal government
does — from making roads to making war — is a tax system pure and simple, the
goal of which is to collect sufficient revenue while doing a minimum of
violence to the economy, private enterprise, and private fortunes. It is those
private fortunes that arouse the moralists. And a tax system or a tax-policy
debate that is primarily moralistic in character is an
invitation to grubbiness: “How much of the wealth of those people we don’t like
very much can we pry away for people like us?”
King Baby has
only one law: “I want!”
It surely is
the case that, as a scientist, Sigmund Freud was a man whose name was one vowel
away from being the perfect aptronym, but he was a pretty good literary critic,
and some of his diagnoses are dead wrong as medicine but dead on as politics.
Please forgive a long quotation:
If we look at the attitude of affectionate parents
towards their children, we have to recognize that it is a revival and
reproduction of their own narcissism, which they have long since abandoned. . .
. They are under a compulsion to ascribe every perfection to the child —
which sober observation would find no occasion to do — and to conceal and
forget all his shortcomings. . . . Moreover, they are inclined to suspend in
the child’s favour the operation of all the cultural acquisitions which their
own narcissism has been forced to respect, and to renew on his behalf the
claims to privileges which were long ago given up by themselves. The child
shall have a better time than his parents; he shall not be subject to the
necessities which they have recognized as paramount in life. Illness, death,
renunciation of enjoyment, restrictions on his own will, shall not touch him;
the laws of nature and of society shall be abrogated in his favour; he shall
once more really be the centre and core of creation — ‘His Majesty the Baby’,
as we once fancied ourselves.
Narcissism —
by which I do not mean a specific psychiatric diagnosis but
the bundle of attitudes and behaviors to which the diagnosis refers, the common
moral failings that are magically transmuted into a medical condition — is a
basic ingredient in democracy. You can’t make a democracy without narcissism
for the same reason you can’t make banana pudding without bananas — it’s not
the only ingredient, but it’s the ingredient that makes the
thing exactly what it is. Freud’s detection of a father’s own dormant ambitions
and latent desires in his hope for his children is confirmed by commonplace
(though by no means universal) experience: If you have in your circle of
friends a former quarterback whose life peaked on the varsity football team
with a teenage son who also plays football, then you have seen this at work.
(My Manhattan readers may think of stage mothers, with “mothers” in that
expression having embraced members of both sexes long before it was fashionable
to do so.) That is a situation which has only two possible outcomes, neither of
them desirable: failure and disappointment or success and envy.
A politics of
narcissism is a politics of envy. Narcissism and envy are not the same thing,
but each is mixed up in the other. But the Freudian point absolutely stands
here: When such specimens as Elizabeth Warren and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
lament “inequality” and spend their days dreaming up ways to make the wealthy
less wealthy, they do not really do so on behalf of the class of people who
work as waitresses at Denny’s or stock Walmart warehouses — they do so on
behalf of the class of people who make comfortable six-figure salaries teaching
at Harvard or park their Teslas in front of the Whole Foods while on one of
those endless errands of “public service.” As Megan McArdle once put it, in
Washington, “very rich” means “just above the level a top-notch journalist in a
two-earner couple could be expected to pull down.” Barack Obama, one in a long
line of Rolex-wearing class warriors, once promised not to raise taxes on
people making $200,000 a year or less. Joe Biden, his senescent epigone (and
another Rolex aficionado), has raised that to $400,000 a year — times are very
good, indeed, for the power-adjacent class.
Senator Joe
Manchin (D., W.Va.) has offered to support a wealth tax as part of his
horse-trading strategy for the Democrats’ big, insane spending bill. Senator
Manchin is not a very serious man in most ways — the best way to think of him
is as a kind of congressional TSA agent: He doesn’t have to be all that sharp
to stand between you and where you are trying to go, and so you have to deal
with him. (I would prefer to see all Senate standoffs settled by a series
of spelling
contests between
Ben Sasse and Patty Murray.) A tax on wealth probably doesn’t sound like a very
big deal to a senator representing the second-poorest state in the Union. (Oh,
Mississippi, the federal statisticians will all be jumping out of windows if
you ever get your act together!) Senator Manchin’s big idea for making West
Virginia better off is not helping the proud citizens of the Mountain State
make the most of their own labor, creativity, and resources — it’s just taking
money from somebody else and dumping it on them. That’s been the West Virginia
way for a long time, which is why every third pile of rocks in the state is named
after the late Senator Robert Byrd.
(Or, as Bill
Clinton called him, “the other Exalted Cyclops.”)
There are many
good arguments against a wealth tax. For one, it is unconstitutional. (Yeah,
Sunshine, I hear you, and you may think the apportionment clause is dumb, but
it’s not imaginary. And the 16th Amendment gives Congress only the
“power to lay and collect taxes on incomes,” not wealth.) It would be
impossible to efficiently administer (even Switzerland got rid of its federal
wealth tax, though there is one at the local level, and, in any case, we are not
Switzerland), which is
why most of the European countries that have had one have abandoned it. The
most obvious problem (though there are many more) is that shares and other
financial instruments can fluctuate substantially by the second — Virgin
Galactic shares, for example, went from $15.50 to $56 over the summer, which
makes establishing a sensible tax valuation difficult. Wealth taxes are
redundant in that we already tax income derived from wealth (that’s what a
capital-gains tax does), which is much easier to pin down. Wealth taxes
penalize saving and reward consumption. Wealth taxes will make housing more
expensive, especially for renters — that is, the people who actually pay
the taxes on their landlords’ portfolios.
But the
biggest problem with a wealth tax is that it entrenches King Baby politics. It is
a great bawling cry of “I want!” A wealth tax is only an invitation for the
majority of the population to put its hand into a minority’s pocket. And that
is straight-up looting. If we were going to have a wealth tax, then we should
do it the way the Swiss do: Instead of starting it at $50 million in wealth, as
Senator Warren proposes, we should start it at $250,000. Our progressive
friends say that taxes are a way of showing that we are all in this together.
But they are always eager to put somebody else’s money where their mouth is.
Donald Trump
Is a Hilariously Incompetent Thief
Sometimes,
Donald Trump’s boundless dishonesty collides with his bottomless stupidity in a
particularly amusing way. Tell me: What kind of genius steals something
that is given away for free?
Trump, as you
may have heard, is making a second go at starting a social-media company,
having failed once already with his Twitteresque “From the Desk of Donald J.
Trump” microblog. You can see the attraction of such a play for Trump: He
almost certainly needs money, and a tech startup is a good way to attract some;
he has been kicked off Twitter and Facebook and is desperate to get back in the
game; right-populists hate Silicon Valley, and they would be pleased to see
Trump put a dent in Big Tech’s collective arrogance, if not its profits.
The problem
comes, unsurprisingly, when you put Donald Trump, arguably America’s
least-competent businessman, in charge of something.
Trump’s new
social-media product is based on code stolen
from Mastodon. We know this
because the theft was so ham-fisted and incompetent that Mastodon’s logo
displays on one of the first pages users of the Trump app are likely to see:
its error page. Mastodon is also mentioned right there in the code, which was
plain as soon as anybody bothered to look.
The funny
thing is: Mastodon’s code is open-source. If Trump wanted to use it, all he had
to do was copy it, acknowledge the copying, and leave that code open to the
public on the same terms. Instead, he slapped a “proprietary” label on somebody
else’s work, turning him from an open-source collaborator into a thief. But
Donald Trump has made his living by putting his name on other people’s work for
so long that it just comes naturally to him.
But it gets
better. (Of course it does!) Trump is threatening to sue another social-media
startup, one that advertises itself as “uncensored” and charges users $5 a
week. The app makers use Donald Trump’s image to advertise their product,
highlighting the fact that he is banned on many social-media platforms. Trump
is, of course, furious. Cease and desist, the lawyers say.
But, at the
same time, his own social-media app is circulating marketing materials made up to
look as though Variety and the New York Times have
signed on as users — which,
of course, they haven’t. TechCrunch is depicted as a user, too: “The headline
displayed next to our logo has never appeared on this site,” the company says,
“and TechCrunch does not have an account on” Trump’s platform.
Variety and the New York Times —
that is who Trump really cares about, as much as he may protest to the
contrary. When he wants to phony up some credibility for himself, he doesn’t
recruit OANN or Newsmax — he pretends to be working with the New York
Times.
As he used to
say on Twitter but can’t anymore: Sad!
The last time
we saw a criminal mastermind this incompetent, he was thwarted by a talking
moose and a squirrel.
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