Class Warfare From an Economic Luddite by Dan Mitchell

Perhaps the greatest living public intellectual is Thomas Sowell and one of his famous quotes asks our leftist friends to quantify how much of other people’s money they supposedly deserve.

Another way of looking at that issue is to ask what’s the maximum tax rate anyone should have to pay. Is it 30 percent? 40 percent? 70 percent?

Or, as we saw in France about 10 years ago, more than 100 percent?

I’m asking these questions because I just read a column for the U.K.-based Guardian by Atossa Araxia Abrahamian.

She frets that the world may soon have a trillionaire, and she has a crazy idea to stop that from happening.

Oxfam…reported that, within a decade, the world will probably see its first trillionaire. …reported that, within a decade, the world will probably see its first trillionaire… Raising taxes, bolstering democratic institutions and seeking to redistribute resources to those who need them are all excellent initiatives worthy of widespread public support. And they should be envisioned not just nationally, but globally: inequality between countries and peoples matters, too. But governments shouldn’t rule out more radical measures, such as limitarianism – that is, capping how much wealth a person can legally have. Once you reach a certain number of zeros, …time to knock a few of them off.

The good news, relatively speaking, is that the author only wants the government to confiscate wealth about $1 trillion.

That’s not nearly as awful as the writer for the New York Times who wants the government to steal everything above $1 billion.

But confiscatory tax rates are a terrible idea at any level. What Ms. Abrahamian does not understand is that super-successful entrepreneurs make the rest of us better off.

Indeed, if Yale Professor William Nordhaus is correct, someone who amasses $1 trillion of wealth will have created tens and tens of trillions of dollars of wealth for everyone else in society.

I’ll take that deal in a nanosecond.

There are two other comments from her article that cry out for correction.

First, she wants readers to believe that people who take risks by investing money in the economy somehow benefit from “unearned income.”

The earnings of the ultra-rich are literally unearned..money made through “investment-type income such as taxable interest, ordinary dividends and capital gain distributions”.

Amazing. She obviously has never talked to anyone who created a business or invested in a company. And she clearly doesn’t realize how the rest of us benefit when people are willing to save and invest (there is a cartoon version if she needs a very simple explanation).

Second, she seems to think that billionaires control the media and are using that control to push a right-wing agenda.

The billionaire class…skews the balance of power in the marketplace, in politics and in society. Its members own newspapers that shape public opinion.

I don’t know the control structure of media companies, other than Jeff Bezos owning the Washington Post. Suffice to say that anyone who thinks the media in general, or the Post in particular, are pushing a right-of center agenda needs psychiatric help.

P.S. One of America’s worst presidents proposed a 100 percent tax rate.