Why we call them Freedom-Haters - today's edition

By now you've heard about Burger King buying the Canadian fast-food chain Tim Horton's, Inc., mainly so it can move its headquarters to Canada and pay a lower tax rate. Pretty much Econ 101: capital flows to where it can best flourish.

Well, Ohio FHer Senator Sherrod Brown feels that this is something to publicly speak out about.  He calls for a boycott of Burger King, getting into all that Elizabeth Warren-type crud about taxpayers funding the infrastructure that made BK's success possible.

For exposing  this "argument" for the totalitarian dog vomit that it is, I cede the floor to Thomas Sowell:

People who run businesses are benefiting from things paid for by others? Since when are people in business, or high-income earners in general, exempt from paying taxes like everybody else?

At a time when a small fraction of high-income taxpayers pay the vast majority of all the taxes collected, it is sheer chutzpah to depict high-income earners as somehow subsidized by “the rest of us,” whether through paying for the building of roads or the educating of the young.

Since everybody else uses the roads and the schools, why should high achievers be expected to feel like freeloaders who owe still more to the government, because schools and roads are among the things that facilitate their work? According to Elizabeth Warren, it’s because it is part of an “underlying social contract.”

Conjuring up some mythical agreement that nobody saw, much less signed, is an old ploy of the Left — one that goes back at least a century, when Herbert Croly, the first editor of The New Republic magazine, wrote a book titled “The Promise of American Life.”

Whatever policy Herbert Croly happened to favor was magically transformed by rhetoric into a “promise” that American society was supposed to have made — and, implicitly, that American taxpayers should be forced to pay for. This pious hokum was so successful politically that all sorts of “social contracts” began to appear magically in the rhetoric of the Left.

If talking in this mystical way is enough to give you control of billions of the taxpayers’ hard-earned dollars, why not?

It's going to be a daunting task indeed to disabuse the post-American public of the notion that "it" in some kind of collective sense is entitled to the money of individual people and organizations.