Orange Sauce With Rich?

MPR was breathlessly reporting the Minnesota Senate proposal to solve their assumed financial problems of the state today. Raise the tax rates on those families that make over $250,000 from 8% to 11%, and a Billion dollars is raised “painlessly” from only 42K people. What could be simpler?

It isn’t hard to understand the mental models that bring one to these conclusions, and given human nature, it isn’t at all hard to understand why many people think it is a good idea. Envy is nearly a universal feeling, and given a lot of the left culture, when you can have a negative emotion and see it as a virtue, the “bargain” is hard to pass up.

The idea of “class warfare” is as old as man, but what has been “new” for the past couple hundred years is a country based on the idea that “class” isn’t destiny, and the size of the economy is far from fixed. America always been “the land of opportunity”, and part of that opportunity was the legitimate chance to make princely sums like a quarter of a million dollars, and maybe even keep a bit more than half of it.

Liberal articles and books often sneer that something like 70% of the population has “dreams of being rich”, with almost the same level of incredulity that they comment that someone “believes in God”. Believing that you have a chance to make it good in America is supposedly foolish since “only 2-3% will actually be rich”. The culture of envy is a very sad culture.

Actually, compared to most of the world, 100% of Americans are “rich”. The real issue that some are richer that others, and even WORSE, many of them that are richer are first generation rich that made that step by some combination of education, luck, hard work, and often thrift. If there WAS a “class”, and it could be seen that one was unable to move up the ladder, then there would be a lot less concern by the left. What they REALLY can’t stand is that there are hundreds of thousands of examples of people that “believed the dream, did the deeds, and reaped the rewards”. That is a sin that those on the left can’t stand at all. The idea that there is “merit” is completely unfair.

Their solution? If success can be made less desirable by removal of rewards, that is WONDERFUL. Like everyone in the envy business, their concern isn’t really for “the common good”, it is “knock down the top”. How much everyone has is of a lot less concern than the fact that some have more. Liberals seek “equality of result”, not “equality of opportunity”. If the opportunity is equal, and mostly unhindered, it is a certainly that the result will NOT be equal, BUT evidence shows that overall result will be the best for all by far.

http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/rankorder/2004rank.html shows the 2004 rankings for GDP per capita. Luxembourg is actually #1 with A LOT lower “capita” at $58,900. The USA weighs in at $40,100. It is hard to figure what nation one would really compare to the US, but in the “familiars, of reasonable size”, Norway is pretty amazing at 4th with $40,000, Denmark shows up in 12th at $32,200, and Canada shows up in 15th at $31,500. A study of what Norway is doing would be interesting … Finland is 21, and Sweden is 26th. I pray it isn’t due to lutefisk.

The US system produces a huge amount of “pie” for the liberals to salivate over dividing up. The problem is that the “pie production” is very much the result of the fact that producers are allowed to keep some of what they produce here. We pretty much peaked out on the “socialist approach” in the Carter years, and discovered that it is always possible to have less economic spoils to be divided. “The rich” are a strong sign that our system works, they are our “golden goose in the coal mine”. 

Having failed at even nursery school, it appears that the liberal thought remains; “Would you like orange sauce with that?”.