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Posted on 10/20/2026 5:38:03 AM PDT by artichokegrower
The Democratic party has a choice to make. Are we going to be New Deal Democrats or corporate Democrats? Are we standing with the working class or the tech oligarchs?
(Excerpt) Read more at theguardian.com ...
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Lead the way morons, lead the way.
These idiots have never taken an economics course.
They are just full of greed and envy. They look at what others have accumulated and they do not see any of the effort that went into accomplishing that.
They think that people like Elon should just hand over control of his companies without any regard for the employees, the shareholders, or anyone else.
These people see the problem as not having enough money to hand out. That is a symptom. The real problem is structural and cultural. They don’t dare address those issues.
You could confiscate 100% of the wealth of all US billionaires and it would run the country for about a year, maybe less. But this isn’t about a sensible tax plan. That would require a massive spending cut or a massive middle class tax increase. If you want to “speak truth to power,” Ro, tell that to your constituents. Because they have the power to kick your slimy ass out of office and probably would if you told them the truth about what is needed.
I wonder how much if Khanna’s wealth is in cash. If he’s anything like most rich people, very little is liquid.
On paper my new worth is a little over a million dollars. It’s all in retirement funds. This supports ownership in thousands of companies likely employing millions of people. If every rich person had to liquidate his investments, unemployment would skyrocket and further bankrupt the state.
I have about $250,000 in equity in my home. I guess I could liquidate that and we could live in a tent down at the city park.
I might have $5000 in actual cash. And guns RO. Wanna see them very briefly?
Ro Khanna’s economic strategy. Marry a rich lady
Source of Wealth: The vast majority of the household’s assets and investments are held by his wife, Ritu Khanna (née Ahuja), whose family fortune stems from her father, Monte Ahuja (founder of Transtar Industries).
The problem is the confusion of money with wealth, and the confusion of paper and money. Now paper can be money, and so can computer digits, but Reichsmarks and the computer ledger entries of the federal reserve are not the same as specie in impossible to forge precious metals or bitcoin though that has been struggling in its recent history as speculators have ransacked that too.
But wealth is the capacity and capability to produce goods and services for which people will willingly trade the product of the fruits of their own labor in a free and open market with the confidence that value is given and value is received as evaluated by the participants in the transaction at the time of the transaction as well as the market as a whole. Elon Musk’s shares are not money, and if the shareholders of SpaceX were to attempt to liquidate tomorrow, get out of the business and hand it over to the new investors you would discover that SpaceX is suddenly worthless because its value is the ability to create needed new things that meet a real need that in itself has value - e.g. cheap and reliable space launch of valuable assets at a scale that no one else can compete with. Get rid of Elon and his key lieutenants and SpaceX becomes ULA which is as close to worthless - propped up by a military bureaucracy that cannot believe that their way of doing business is bankrupt - and will trade at the scrap cost of the paper the shares are printed on.
Go ahead. Try that. See what happens.
The idiots never learn.
They say “tax” but mean confiscation of a percent of your assets every year.
The goal is no private property, no savings, total dependence on the government.
We don’t need to live off the property of productive people who have stolen nothing from us. The USA isn’t like feudal England, where conquoring feudal lords turn subjugated English landowners into serfs.
We don’t need to live off the property of productive people who have stolen nothing from us. The USA isn’t like feudal England, where conquoring feudal lords turn subjugated English landowners into serfs.
It’s good to see we have some common ground. My apologies for the personal insult.
Democrats remain unequal
A wealth tax on billionaires is not a “tax on income”; it is a claim that the state owns a continuing percentage of what you own—year after year—regardless of whether you’ve committed any crime, regardless of whether you’ve realized gains, and regardless of whether the property was acquired by voluntary trade. In Objectivist terms, it is institutionalized expropriation.
1) The moral issue: it treats property rights as conditional
Property is the material form of the right to life in a social context: to act, produce, keep, and use the product of your effort by voluntary exchange. A wealth tax asserts the opposite premise:
“You may own things only by permission, and only so long as you keep paying tribute.”
That is closer in principle to feudal tenure than to a rights-based republic.
2) It necessarily targets capital—i.e., the means of production
Billionaires are billionaires mostly because they own productive assets (equity in companies, factories, technologies), not because they have cash under a mattress.
A wealth tax therefore falls on:
business ownership,
investment capital,
long-term productive assets.
Economically (in the broad causal sense emphasized by Reisman), that means less capital accumulation and more pressure to liquidate or divert assets into tax-avoidance strategies—both of which undercut production and, in the long run, wages.
3) The practical mechanics are destructive
Even setting morality aside, a wealth tax has built-in problems:
Valuation: private businesses, illiquid assets, art, partnerships—values are uncertain and manipulable.
Liquidity: if your wealth is in equity, you may have to sell assets to pay the tax, forcing liquidation.
Double/triple taxation: assets were typically bought with after-tax income; returns are often taxed; then the stock is taxed again merely for existing.
Political discretion: exemptions and definitions become lobbying targets—rewarding pull over production.
These are not “bugs”; they are the predictable result of trying to tax ownership itself rather than taxing payment for genuine government services.
4) The typical justifications—and the answer in principle
“They’re hoarding.”
Owning capital is not hoarding; it is typically investment. In a market, capital funds production, expansion, research, and jobs.
“It reduces inequality.”
Equality is not a moral primary. Justice is. If wealth was earned by voluntary trade, “inequality” is not an injustice—confiscation is.
“They have too much political power.”
That’s an argument to limit government power, not to expand it. If the state has the power to seize wealth at will, you have guaranteed the very corruption you claim to fear.
5) The proper alternative (rights + anti-cronyism)
If the concern is fortunes built on:
subsidies,
bailouts,
rigged contracting,
regulatory privilege,
fraud,
then attack those—end privileges, enforce objective law, prosecute fraud. Don’t declare peaceful ownership a target.
6) Bottom line
A wealth tax on billionaires is:
morally: a denial of property rights (a form of legalized looting),
economically: a tax on capital formation and productive accumulation,
politically: a step toward arbitrary state control over who may own what.
So The Guardian has finished wrecking Britain and is now starting on the US?
What billionaires do with the money is less evil that what politicians do with what’s left of it after lining their own pockets.
NO PRIVATE PROPERTY===NO REAL ESTATE INDUSTRY
NO MORTGAGE INDUSTRY
NO PROPERTY TAXES ==REVENUE FOR YOUR COUNTY
> These idiots have never taken an economics course.
How do these euphemistic fictions persist?
The left knows EXACTLY what the results of these actions would be, even the results of threatening them.
They want economic destruction; they want innovation to stop because new things are outside of their control; they want productive people to flee or suffer; and they want these things because the non-US pseudo-elites who fund and control them want to be nobility and put down the very idea of individual liberty and self-governance.
IMO all this stems from their ultimate master who hates all love and liberty in the specific person of Christ Jesus.
Also IMO allowing fictions like they don’t understand, they’re crazy, don’t they know, etc. is a form of self-deceit practiced because the implications are very serious, the actions we really ought to take equally serious, and nobody wants to go first (self included) so we all type at each other instead.
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