Progressives will do everything they can to steal money from anyone they perceive as having “wealth” and transferring it to anyone that doesn’t. This is their entire reason for life: to redistribute income among the various classes. In leftwing circles, this is known as equity. In rational circles, it’s called communism.
An illustrative case in point is the current debacle about Alameda County’s rent moratorium. It was put into place allegedly because of COVID, and said that renters didn’t have to pay rent for a three-year period running from March 2020 through April 2023.
Its backers claimed this was due to the pandemic, but they never could quite figure out just how the pandemic made it okay for renters to cheat on their rent. In fact, there was no good reason for it. The anti-rent activists simply used COVID as an excuse to practice their class war: robbing productive citizens, i.e. landlords, to give to shirkers and grifters who thought themselves entitled to a free place to live.
Nobody, I suppose, likes to pay rent, but there’s nothing quite so vicious as a poor person who believes herself entitled to a free home because “housing is a human right.” We heard that excuse over and over again during COVID; it was made notorious when Carroll Fife and her fellow conspirators squatted in that West Oakland house and refused to leave even though they were breaking the law. But the law, as such, has never meant much to far-left radicals, who see “law” as simply the will of White people imposed on poor people of color. Fife used that illegal act to propel herself onto the Oakland City Council, where she remains.
Alameda County has been sued, predictably, over their unjust rent moratorium law. The lawsuit, brought by landlords, “argues that their property rights were egregiously violated by forcing them to absorb years of unpaid rent,” according to East Bay Insiders.
I remember going to at least one rally when the landlords gathered to make their case to the public. They convinced me. Landlord after landlord went up to the podium and told their stories into the microphone. Those stories were outrageous. Many of the landlords were elderly people, of all ethnicities, who had worked all their lives to buy a second home they could subsequently rent out in order to help them in their old age. Their incomes were violently stripped from them by zealous, angry communist radicals, who hated landlords and believed that poor people of color should be able to live for free in someone else’s house—exactly as Fife had. It was so obvious that these various rent moratorium laws were absolute violations of people’s Constitutional rights, and were force-fed to compliant Boards of Supervisors and City Councils by revolutionaries who had no respect for anyone’s rights except their own. I left those rallies feeling more than ever that Oakland’s woke radicals were insane and cruel, and bent on overturning our culture. If you were working hard and paying your taxes, you were a loser. If you were a lazy grifter, you were a winner.
I was right. And those “progressives” are still out there. Fife is still out there. They’re still conspiring to smash productive, law-abiding citizens by stealing their hard-earned money and giving it to their conniving allies. East Bay Insiders reports that, if the lawsuits against the county are successful, “Alameda County could be on the hook for hundreds of millions in damages.” Good. I hope the lawsuits are successful, and those wronged landlords are awarded the reparations they’re entitled to.
Steve Heimoff