The essence of collectivism is out-and-out theft

I just came across an essay at The American Prospect  entitled "Want to Expand the Economy? Tax the Rich!" by  guy named Nick Hanauer. He's a venture capitalist, but a huge leftie. In that, he's not really an anomaly. Warren Buffett has said that he'd be delighted to pay more in taxes.

I've given you what you need to Google it. I'm not linking to it. I don't want to be responsible for it getting hits.

He exposes his disingenuousness in the second paragraph by citing Harley-Davidson's moving of some production overseas. As we've noted here at LITD, that's due to the tariffs imposed by Trump, not the tax cuts passed by Congress. He also mentions Kimberly-Clark's restructuring, which involves plant closings, neglecting to go into the reasons for that:

Like other consumer products makers, notably Procter & Gamble (PG, +0.09%), Kimberly-Clark is dealing with a price war in key categories and weak demand for some products such as diapers amid a declining birth rate. P&G among others has also been slashing prices on key items such as diapers.

Organic sales for the company, a measure the strips out the impact of currency fluctuations, was flat for the year even though the company was more optimistic about 2017 at the year’s outset. Kimberly-Clark expects organic sales to be 1% this new fiscal year, helped by higher volumes that are helping it contend with lower prices.

The job cuts and factory closings are part of a plan to cut costs by $2 billion in cost cuts by 2021. At the same time, amid the pressures on its business, the company said it would raise its dividend by 3%, something that lifted Kimberly-Clark’s stagnating stock price on Tuesday morning. News of the reductions stands in stark contrast to the many hiring and bonuses announcements by large U.S. corporations in recent weeks in the wake of the recent tax reform bill.

Then he trots out the banal buzz-terms. The recent tax cut was a "trickle-down scam." A "financial giveaway."

But then he gets into the case of Kansas - the Brownback tax cuts and the subsequent economic shortfall.

And, once again, he leaves the important stuff out.

Brownback's initial tax cut proposal was far less than what the state Senate finally put in place.  And spending was never actually cut, only the rate of spending growth.  

Ben Haller at Reason fleshes out the details of how the Kansas case went awry:

What went wrong? First, the legislature failed to eliminate politically popular exemptions and deductions, making the initial revenue drop more severe than the governor planned. The legislature and the governor could have reduced government spending to offset the decrease in revenue, but they also failed on that front. Government spending per capita remained relatively stable in the years following the recession to the present, despite the constant fiscal crises. In fact, state expenditure reports from the National Association of State Budget Officers show that total state expenditures in Kansas increased every year except 2013, where expenditures decreased a modest 3 percent from 2012. It should then not come as a surprise that the state faced large budget gaps year after year.

In addition to a failure to control government spending, Kansas officials failed to ditch one of the worst elements of the tax plan: the total elimination of taxes on pass-through entities. Pass through entities are, to put it simply, businesses that pay taxes through the individual income tax code as opposed to the corporate code. It's particularly bizarre that this provision survived because even those who supported Brownback's other tax cuts, such as the Tax Foundation, felt this part of the plan went too far and encouraged tax avoidance. Instead of policies like eliminating tax loopholes, lowering tax rates, and broadening the tax base—the most common elements of tax reform—the state created arguably one of the largest loopholes that could be found in any state tax code and exempted businesses that employ over 50 percent of the state's workforce. You would have to shoot state accountants in the foot if you wanted to make it any harder for them to balance the budget.

Finally, Brownback compounded those mistakes by doing the exact opposite of what an ardent supply-sider, or any fiscal conservative, should do next: he raised taxes.

In fact, the state's 2015 tobacco tax increase was only one-third what the governor wanted; the legislature rightly reduced it because they felt Brownback's proposal would disproportionately affect low income people and drive business out of the state. The governor also pushed for an increase in the state sales tax from 6.15 percent to 6.5 percent (the rate people end up paying is even higher when local taxes are taken into account), and he got it. Sales taxes are inherently regressive, but in Kansas they are particularly so because it's one of only a few states that tax food.

Even those regressive, poorly planned tax increases failed to solve the budget crisis.

This Hanauer character doesn't get into that.

Then he gets into how "the world" is "awash in money." And it's here that we get to the essence of how sinister his argument is.

He's talking about money as if it's fungible, just kind of "out there" and not really belonging to anybody.

Listen up, mister: Every last dollar in the economy belongs to some person or organization, and what they do with what is theirs is none of your stinking business.

Now, the leftist rejoinder to that is to get into the business about "inequality" and how some people are still barely scraping by.

My suggestion to them is to think in terms of opportunity, because it's out there:

The latest Bureau of Labor Statistics data show 6 million unfilled jobs and a shortage of workers to fill them. This is the very definition of a tight labor market and will most likely lead to higher wages and bonuses to workers. It is already having this effect. In some parts of the country, employers are paying signing bonuses of up to $25,000 for welders, pipe fitters, engineers and truck drivers.

"We've probably never had a situation like we have today, where the demand (for workers) is strong and capacity is constrained," says Bob Costello, chief economist of the American Trucking Associations.

Finally, the real unemployment rate, the so-called U-6 rate, which includes discouraged workers who have dropped out of the workforce and those who can only find part-time work, has fallen to 8% this year, down from a high of 16% in Barack Obama's first term.

Two things, in conclusion:

1. Money is not fungible, and government has no business taking one more red cent of anybody's money than is necessary to fulfill what were commonly understood to be government's functions prior to the progressive era.
2. A major reason it's unfortunate that we have Trump as president, the credit given to him in the title of the above-linked Stephen Moore piece notwithstanding, is that principles get buried under muddied circumstances, such as the above-discussed facts that Trump's protectionism motivated Harley-Davidson to move some production offshore.

This Hanauer character is advocating theft, pure and simple.