It must be enormously gratifying for a woke politician to find herself in the powerful position of being able to steal money from her political opponents and give it to her supporters.
All of a sudden, they go from being nobodies whom nobody cared about to oligarchs, empowered by law to pick the pockets of people they’ve hated for years, and give the purloined cash to their friends. Who wouldn’t love being in that position?
The nobodies I’m referring to are thirty years of elected politicians in Oakland, who by hook or by cook conspired with unions and race-mongering groups to get elected to the City Council and Mayor’s office. Many of them started out as so-called “neighborhood activists” and then worked their way up the greasy pole by making unsavory, secretive deals with people who gave them money to fund their campaigns. You can look at this either as unscrupulous collusion or simply as the way politics is done. I see it as the former.
Redistribution of wealth was not invented by Karl Marx but communism certainly gave the notion a boost. With an aim at reducing inequality, Marxist redistribution of wealth was an attack on the capitalistic system itself which, Marxists argued, was not only incapable of solving great inequality but was in fact its cause. The idea was to use the power of the state to seize the wealth of the upper classes and transfer it to the poor and working classes, in proportion of their need for it.
No wonder communism and its close cousin socialism were so attractive to so many Americans, including some of my relatives in the 1930s-1950s. Redistribution seemed fairer than allowing a small cadre of elites to pile up and hoard the nation’s wealth for themselves. This is why the Democratic Party flourished in the second half of the twentieth century. The working classes saw their lives made easier by things like Social Security, unemployment insurance and Medicare, and they rewarded the Democratic Party by consistently re-electing it to power.
But then something happened. Wokeism or progressivism—call it what you will—seized control of the Democratic Party and, over a relatively quick period, things got out of control. No longer were Democrats content to take money merely from the wealthy; now, they wanted to take it from the middle classes, more and more each year. Predictably, the middle classes didn’t react well. It wasn’t only that they resented being robbed by government; they also detested where the money was going. It was no longer to just the poor and sick; it was to everyone who felt entitled to a better life, who demanded that government give them things they hadn’t worked for and thus didn’t deserve. The middle classes saw, in effect, their hard-earned dollars given to freeloaders, grifters, moochers, cheaters, losers, sociopaths and thieves—people who during normal periods of history would have been, and were, shunned. Instead, the new Democratic Party adopted these people as its new legatees and, as the need for ever-vaster sums of money grew, so too liberals invented new forms of taxation until everything conceivable was taxed. In George Harrison’s words,
If you drive a car, I'll tax the street
If you try to sit, I'll tax your seat
If you get too cold, I'll tax the heat
If you take a walk, I'll tax your feet
Republicans always have complained about taxes while Democrats and Independents felt that while they may be irritating, they are an inevitable part of life. “In this world,” as Ben Franklin observed, “nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.” What has changed in the last few years is the feeling of many Democrats and perhaps most independents that liberals have gone too far. Americans are willing to be taxed if they perceive the money is spent wisely and fairly. But when they see their money profligately given to sketchy people who don’t deserve it, especially when those people insult and belittle them, the American people correctly rise up and rebel.
The Democratic Party has a chance—maybe its last—to renounce its stupidities of the past and become once again the party of the middle classes (which Republicans obviously are not). But in order to do so they have to renounce their addiction to taxes. This is exactly the opposite of what’s going on now in Oakland, where the confiscation crowd on the City Council, led by their socialist mayor, at this very moment are conspiring to add to the already enormous burden of taxes on us by imposing even more, in ever more invasive ways, until the pips squeak and the wheels groan.
Steve Heimoff