Mar
4
2026

A Government Big Enough to Give You Everything You Want…

is a government big enough to take away everything that you have.

[Amazon Link]
(paid link)

It's a great quote, and that's a nice picture Amazon will sell you, but there's no evidence Thomas Jefferson ever actually said that. (Gerald Ford did, though.)

There's currently a push to get government working on taking away everything you have, though. Actually giving you everything you want? Or anything you want? That's in the works. They promise.

On that theme today, let's first look at Daniel J. Mitchell, who outlines The Nightmare Scenario Leading to a Wealth Tax. Far more likely than you or I would like:

  1. Thanks in part to mistakes by the Trump Administration (most notably protectionism), the economy is mediocre and dissatisfied voters give the left control of the House of Representative this November.
  2. The left also may win control of the Senate later this year, but that will almost surely happen in 2028 if it doesn’t happen this November.
  3. Because of a generic desire for change, as well on a 2020-style backlash against Trump, voters also elect a left-leaning president in 2028, giving Democrats control of both the White House and Congress.
  4. Just like when Democrats had full control during Biden’s first two years, they will push a radical agenda to expand the size, scope, and cost of government.
  5. But this time, the left is fully unified and has the ability to enact crazy policies (unlike in 2021 and 2022 when Senator Manchin and Senator Sinema refused to support Biden’s full “Build Back Better” agenda).
  6. High on the list of crazy policies is a national wealth tax that would impose de facto confiscatory tax rates on saving and investment.

Daniel's post is link-filled. Specifically, he looks at one recent actual proposal, described by Ira Stoll at the Free Beacon: Sanders, Khanna Unveil $4.4 Trillion Tax Increase.

Sen. Bernie Sanders, socialist of Vermont, and Rep. Ro Khanna, a Democrat from California best known for trafficking in Epstein-related conspiracy theories, are pushing legislation that would impose a new 5 percent annual wealth tax on billionaires and use the revenue to give money to everyone earning less than $150,000 a year.

The bill, which the politicians are calling the Make Billionaires Pay Their Fair Share Act, would raise $4.4 trillion over a decade, according to a letter from Emanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, economists at the University of California, Berkeley, that was released by the leftist politicians.

Needless to say, it's a horrible idea, should be plainly unconstitutional (an uncompensated "taking" banned by the Fifth Amendment), and fueled by the worst kind of demagoguery.

And, as Jack Nicastro poionts out, there's an additional small problem: The Sanders-Khanna 'billionaire tax' would make all Americans poorer. Excerpt, with some basic econ:

In a press release, Sanders said all this money will be collected from billionaires who are "collectively worth $8.2 trillion." The problem with this framing is that billionaires are not greedy dragons, sleeping atop piles of hoarded gold.

Two-thirds of billionaire wealth is held in the form of equity, affording private and publicly traded companies the capital required to improve their products, increase their headcount, and generate returns for their shareholders, many of whom are middle-class Americans with 401(k) plans and individual retirement accounts. (About 31 percent of billionaire wealth is held in liquid assets, such as bank deposits, much of which is also invested.)

Another point, not particularly subtle: assets automatically become less valuable if they can be arbitrarily expropriated by "legal" thieves. The money that might be raised from a wealth tax would prove highly evanescent.

Also of note:

  • Shame on me. I've read a lot about Adam Smith (example), but not anything by him. Helen Dale urges me to mend my ways: Adam Smith’s Gift.

    Smith thought people could morally improve themselves in part by entering imaginatively into other people’s perspectives, in part by stepping outside their own perspectives and taking, as my mother used to say, a good long look at themselves. I could do the former, often in a way redolent of the Robbie Burns couplet: O wad some Power the giftie gie us, To see oursels as ithers see us! Observe, in embryo, the future novelist.

    All imaginative fiction depends on writers being the eyes for other people, something quite unnerving for those on the receiving end of such focused attention. One friend of mine—on recognising herself in one of my published short stories—told me years later that it was like someone had turned her upside down and gone through the contents of her pockets, but without once touching her. She also asked me not to do it again.

    I’ve come to call this the gift of noticing, and it’s something at which Smith excels. Go back and re-read his description of the pin factory in Wealth of Nations if you haven’t done so for a while. Hold it in your head alongside Charles Dickens, say, in Hard Times, describing machines in a mill as “melancholy mad elephants, polished and oiled up for the day’s monotony … at their heavy exercise again.”

  • What does it take to be a "researcher" at Harvard’s Global Education Innovation Initiative? River Page invites us to Meet the Internet’s New Iran Expert—Who Thinks the Illuminati Runs the World. River notes that Xueqin Jiang is (indeed) listed as a researcher at that prestigious institution. And he's received a lot of attention lately. Including:

    On Monday, Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti, hosts of the popular daily news podcast Breaking Points, spoke to Jiang in an interview that seemed somewhat reasonable—until it wasn’t. Jiang said that he thought President Donald Trump was acting hubristically in Iran because of his success in Venezuela, predicted that the U.S. would send ground troops into Iran, and opined on what the effects of decreased investment from the under-fire Gulf States could mean for the U.S. economy. Then things got more interesting.

    “The last factor that is very important is an eschatological factor,” Jiang said, veering the conversation into territory that was unprompted by the hosts. “If you look at the Epstein files, it’s clear that we are run by secret societies. It’s clear that the world is run by these individuals who have a lot of power. We don’t know who they are, but they control the military. They control the national security apparatus. There are different names for these people. You can call them the Illuminati. And the Illuminati are composed of three major groups, okay? You have the Jesuits, who control the Vatican. You have the Sabbatean Frankists, which control the modern state of Israel today. And you have the Freemasons, which control the national security apparatus of the United States, and they believe that Israel, this war in the Middle East, is key to the end times, in creating heaven on Earth.”

    He has a Wikipedia page, but it doesn't mention this. Yet.


Last Modified 2026-04-13 11:29 AM EDT