It has recently come to my attention that certain people have more money than other people.
Not only is this fact disturbing on a societal level, it has also caused various painful memories to resurface from my own past. One in particular replays itself again and again. It’s lunch time and I’m in grade six. My dutch friend Tim is enjoying a crustless, wonder-bread sandwich with chocolate sprinkles. I’m sitting next to him, making dry, emphatic smacking sounds while attempting to muster enough saliva to reconstitute a three-day old bran muffin. Despite my evident suffering, he refuses to share a single bite of his sandwich with me.
The recollection of this early exposure to capitalist swinery plunged me into an extended, self-destructive memory cycle, which I’ve been attempting to resolve with a sequence of nutella and fruit-loop danishes. So far I’ve just gained fifteen pounds.
Thankfully, Canadians for Tax Fairness, a non-profit, non-partisan, definitely-not-socialist advocacy group recently published a report, “Which looked at the wealth held by ultra-rich families in Canada’s four biggest provinces and . . . proposed that different annual and one-time wealth taxes could address inequality.”
This could be the answer to all of our problems. To THE problem …
… The problem of billionaires.
And, really, the much bigger problem of me not being one of them.
The nature of wealth
The error of all “eat the rich” rhetoric can be illustrated by means of a bad analogy. It starts with a cake — let’s say a cake divided into sixteen pieces. If Musk, Bezos, and Zuckerberg each take four pieces of that cake, that only leaves four pieces for the rest of us. This is unfair. This is unjust.1 In fact, the only way to correct such gross inequality is to take a big ol’ utility knife and start carving away slivers of other people’s cake, call it a slice tax, which can then be reabsorbed into the common cake pool.
And can we all just agree that a pool of cake sounds like a great place to spend an August afternoon? The yellow jackets would be a problem, of course.
There’s a tiny problem though.
Those who’ve taken logic will hopefully remember that an analogy is only as good as its premise. And in this case, the premise smells like a ditch full of dead racoons. That’s because wealth isn’t a zero-sum situation (one person’s gain is inevitably another person’s loss). The fact that billionaires make billions of dollars doesn’t inherently prevent someone else from also making billions of dollars; which helps explain why there are 3400 billionaires in the world instead of just one. Wealth is a product of labour. More wealth can be generated — more cake can be made — if more people engage in labour.
Now, are there forces in the world, or in your life, which would make such a pursuit unlikely or unwise? Sure. Likely, even. But it’s not because other people are stealing anything from you. To resurrect our analogy, wealth is more like cupboards of ingredients than a finished cake. Or a field of wheat. Or a grove of peaches. Or a tree full of … cinnamon … nuts?
Advocates of redistributive economics — typically either government officials, welfare recipients, or morally-desperate retirees — don’t like illimitable wealth models for many reasons. Some of these include: 1. It’s easier to blame others than be responsible for your own success (or failure). 2. It’s essential for the aims of the would-be authoritarian State that its citizens come to believe socioeconomic harmony (i.e., “equality”) cannot be achieved apart from its direct and constant intervention. 3. Would-be authoritarian states cannot achieve critical mass apart from atomic levels of taxation — redistributive rhetoric (carefully couched in virtue) provides the ideal front by which to launder and diffuse taxpayer money throughout its own ranks.
The nature of government
It is advantageous for the State that its citizens believe billionaires are mustachioed villains hiding in their bedrooms, surrounded by little brown sacks with dollar signs on them. This is also why they’re happy to render modest tithes to media outlets: the narrative must keep spinning.
In this reimagined fairy tale, government adopts the role of Robin Hood, with taxation functioning as both his bow and merry men, enabling him to “acquire” the stolen wealth. He can then trundle it through the villages on a big wooden cart, tossing guilders and haunches of venison to starving peasants. The problem with this narrative, apart from the fact that it’s missing a priest and a rabbi, is that it hinges on the validity of the first argument, which I’ve already demonstrated is phonier than an AbTronic belt.
Now, hear what I’m saying. I’m not saying taxation is theft in itself. Jesus is pretty clear there’s a legitimate place for taxes and let’s none of us start pretending we’re holier than Jesus. But then, Jesus also condemns hypocrites who wax on about their commitment to the public good, and righting wrongs, and correcting inequalities and then go on to “tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on people’s shoulders.”
The truth is, none of the frauds who talk about fixing inequality actually give a rat’s ear for the poor. Nor do they care that their “solutions” only make the lives of those on the edge of poverty even more precarious. What they do care about, and what Pharisees of every age care about, is someone else having what they want, what a ceremonial observance of righteousness can do for a guilty conscience, and what certain forms of social homage can do for their own influence.
The nature of redistribution
Combining all federal, provincial, and local taxes (income tax, payroll deductions, sales tax, property tax, and fuel tax), the average Canadian family gives around 42.3% of their total cash income to the government. Despite this, and despite truly heroic spending, all of the things we’re supposedly paying for (healthcare, education, etc.) are patently getting worse. Coincidentally, thousands of government employees now make over $200,000 salaries.
The only thing that happens when an already-fat state figures out how to accrue more taxes, is that it gets fatter. We call this the “My 600-pound government” principle.
The point at which redistributive models fully metastasize is the point at which there are no longer enough goods and services to redistribute. In Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, he describes the futility of life in a Soviet labour camp, in which one team of labourers is forced to steal metal sheeting from another camp project in order to complete their own project. There isn’t enough resources to go around because no one is actually doing anything. Socialist rhetoric only remains viable as long as there is enough incidental wealth to sustain the parasite class. Redistribution schemes ultimately lead to a degradation of services across the board.
Even if we grant that heavy taxation would benefit the general population, Thomas Sowell notes that higher taxes for the rich don’t actually result in more taxes being collected. It simply means the rich move elsewhere, or sink their funds into tax-proof investments. Which, in fact, is exactly what’s happening. No one who isn’t a cenobite is going to sit around indefinitely while you stab them with sharpened curtain poles until their lifeblood drains into a pail.
The nature of nature
The socialist problem is perennial because human nature is perennial. The factor that provoked Cain to murder his brother is the same factor provoking us now: envy.
You feel it when your friend buys the truck you’ve been lusting after for months. You feel it when you see people on a cruise that you’ve been wanting to go on, or when someone starts talking about an opportunity you’d been hoping for. “That deserves to be me,” you tell yourself. “Why are they so happy and I’m so miserable?” And then that fateful phrase: “It’s not fair.”
Pretty soon we start looking for someone to blame. When we start to realize how petty and vindictive we sound, we have to disguise that envy in pious language. We care about justice. We care about equality. We want everyone to have their fair share. No we don’t. We’re mad that other people have what we want, and blame and revenge is more gratifying than taking another job or being content with what you have.
The cure isn’t easy. But it is simple. And because I feel guilty for starting you off with a bad analogy, I’m going to leave you with a great one:
The central cultural peril we face is the deadly sin of envy. Envy lies at the root of virtually every political trouble we have, and we have many. The antidote is therefore gratitude, and it needs to be 100 proof gratitude. Now the only place you can get that kind of gratitude is from the distilleries of Heaven, made with peat from the salt marshes of Paradise. We need something smoky enough to burn away every form of envy, the kind of envy that loves to hide under the human tongue, like the malicious bacteria it is. Roll that drink around in your mouth, and let it do all of the grateful work.
-Doug Wilson
Notice that socialists always carefully curate their language to ensure everyone knows they’re not actually concerned about having more money themselves. It’s always about “justice.” We call these whitewashed tombs.
Well said sir! While we’re referencing Sowell (which you may have quoted in a past article):
“There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it . . . To all these people — from academia and journalism, as well as the middle-class people themselves — it apparently seems strange somehow that there should be such a thing as scarcity and that this should imply a need for both productive efforts on their part and personal responsibility in spending. Yet nothing has been more pervasive in the history of the human race than scarcity and all the requirements for economizing that go with scarcity."