Pun Salad

The Bronx Democrat turned her wrath on big tech companies last week, but not for spying on Americans, promoting internal groupthink or censoring information at the government’s request.

AOC, as she’s popularly known, is mad that they sponsored a libertarian student conference.

She responded to a report by the progressive magazine Mother Jones that Google donated $25,000, and Facebook and Microsoft $10,000 each, to sponsor Students for Liberty’s LibertyCon.

Listen, it wouldn’t be fair to accuse presidential hopeful Kamala Harris of supporting state control over the means of all production. To this point she’s only focused on the energy, health care, auto-manufacturing and education sectors. Good candidates prioritize.

In this age of hyperbole, I sometimes worry about overusing words like “socialist” or “authoritarian.” Yet, if we accept that an “authoritarian” is a person “who favors or enforces strict obedience to authority, especially that of the government, at the expense of personal freedom,” I’m not sure how anyone watching Harris’ campaign kick-off (sponsored by CNN!) could argue that her policy positions do not fit that description.

For starters, here are some of the things that Harris believes the state can ban at expense of your personal freedom: private health insurance, your car, affordable energy, political speech, your guns, for-profit colleges, and government office holding for practicing Catholics. Of course, the media, complicit in normalizing these hard-left positions over the past decade, treat her agenda as the centrist option for voters. Who knows? Maybe in the contemporary Democratic Party it is.

Our national press is a national joke. Vain, languid, excitable, morbid, duplicitous, cheap, insular, mawkish, and possessed of a chronic self-obsession that would have made Dorian Gray blush, it rambles around the United States in neon pants, demanding congratulation for its travails. Not since Florence Foster Jenkins have Americans been treated to such an excruciating example of self-delusion. The most vocal among the press corps’ ranks cast themselves openly as “firefighters” when, at worst, they are pyromaniacs and, at best, they are obsequious asbestos salesmen. “You never get it right, do you?” Sybil Fawlty told Basil in Fawlty Towers. “You’re either crawling all over them licking their boots or spitting poison at them like some Benzedrine puff adder.” There is a great deal of space between apologist and bête noire. In the newsrooms of America, that space is empty.

To understand whether wealth tax rates are high or low, it is helpful to convert them into equivalent income tax rates, which are more familiar and easier to understand. Consider a taxpayer who holds a long term bond with a fixed interest rate of 3 percent each year. Because a 2 percent wealth tax captures 67 percent of the interest income of the bondholder makes each year, it is essentially identical to a 67 percent income tax. The proposed tax raises the same revenue and has the same economic effects, whether it is called a 2 percent wealth tax or a 67 percent income tax.

A 67 percent income tax is clearly a high tax rate. The tax rate is no less high when it is relabeled as a 2 percent wealth tax each year. Changing labels does not change reality. The 3 percent wealth tax that Warren has proposed for billionaires is still higher, equivalent to a 100 percent income tax rate in this example. The total tax burden is even greater because the wealth tax would be imposed on top of the 37 percent income tax rate.

My own sense is that the best moral defense of billionaires requires putting the socialists on the defensive by answering the billionaire question with some other questions. Would it be moral for politicians in Washington to change the laws so that becoming a billionaire in America would be impossible, no matter how much value an entrepreneur creates for customers and shareholders and society as a result of the entrepreneur's hard work, genius, and risk-raking? What would that proposed alternative system do to the American dream and to its traditions of strong property rights? Why scapegoat and demonize a few billionaires for public health problems in Alabama that they have nothing to do with?

Won't we be more likely to make progress against poverty and disease if we avoid divisively linking those problems to the existence of a few rich people who aren't actually at fault for them? Is it a "moral world" where politicians can motivate millions of voters to blame a country's problem on a handful of wealthy individuals, and to suggest, without evidence, that long-term and intractable problems can be quickly solved if only tax rates were dramatically increased? Is the Democratic fixation with the billionaires (problem) and taxes (solution) much different from the Trump fixation on immigrants and the border wall?

The lowest-spending Representative in the 115th Congress (and over his lifetime) was Michigan’s Justin Amash, who voted to cut roughly $165 billion during the 115th Congress. Nearly tied with Amash was Kentucky’s Thomas Massie.

Senators Rand Paul and Mike Lee each voted to cut over $150 billion during the 115th Congress, with Rand Paul as the lowest-spending Senator. Surprisingly, democratic socialist Bernie Sanders voted to increase spending by the fourth-lowest amount, roughly $140 billion. By comparison, Republican Senator Marco Rubio voted for a net spending increase of roughly $330 billion, more than twice as much as Sanders.