Warren Understands that Politics is Loot and Plunder

Rightly or wrongly, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) understands that elections are not about religious questions like abortion and gun control and climate change. Government is about loot and plunder. You promise your supporters goodies in return for their vote.

So she is promising Social Security recipients $200 per month extra on their monthly checks. To be paid for by people earning over $250,000 a year with a 14.8 percent tax on wages exceeding $250,000 a year and a 14.8 percent tax on investment earnings over $250,000 ($400,000 on families) per year.

Really, what's not to like? The top 10% of federal income taxpayers already pony up a little less than 40% of the income tax take. Go where the money is.

I suppose it is useless for a guy like me to point out that untaxed income of the rich is a "live" resource that will be used by the rich to create jobs from anything from the wages of startup company employees to the wages of yacht-builder and mansion-builder employees. Whereas once resources are seized by the government in taxes they are dead as dead can be, paid out to people who are not taking the money in exchange for services rendered but just as loot.

The "science" is pretty clear on this, from the classical economics of Adam Smith to the marginal economics of 1870, even to the Keynesian economics of post World War I. The less the government gets its cotton-pickin' hands on the earnings obtained by people in voluntary economic activity the better.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren has to know this. Even though her law degree comes not from Harvard or Yale but from Rutgers Law School, she is bound to know Economics 101. But Economics 101 does not get you elected President of the United States, and for some reason the same people that blather on about "settled science" when it comes to climate change are notably silent when it comes to settled economic science, about the human knowledge that explains the unprecedented Great Enrichment of the last 200 years.

Imagine a better world. Imagine a world in which an impressionable teenager like Greta Thunberg was lecturing the United Nations about the iniquity of taxing young workers and taking economic growth away from their futures in order to pay the pensions of older workers. Why, if government teachers spent five minutes teaching economics in government schools instead of climate change orthodoxy who knows what impressionable kids would think? Look, this is not that hard; conomics is not rocket science. Why, I dare say you could design a computer game to show children how economics works.

But here is the point. Just as nobody thought about gravitation until Newton, nobody thought about supply and demand until Smith. But, boy, what a difference it made. So our educated class knows all about the science of the modern era. But it would prefer not to, not when it is going back to the future on its Great Reaction, not when it conflicts with its power project.

Of course in a better world the voters would understand that when Sen. Warren offers them loot and plunder she is really bribing them with their own money. And, of course, if you are not in with the in-crowd you get to stand in line to get your share, and, if money is being handed out as loot it is not going to grow the economy so that the next generation can be better off that we are.

In a better world humans would not be tempted by loot and plunder, but I am not holding my breath. Obviously loot and plunder is one of the ways that humans have survived over the millennia. It has been a successful adaptation, at least up until now. 

Now I think that the age of loot and plunder is over, because humans don't get into a cornered-rat situation too much any more where it pays to loot and steal when you are starving in the hope that it will get you over the hump.

But we are still programmed to go for loot and plunder, and politicians know it. A politician like Sen. Warren started out her professional life with a lie, that she had native American blood, and so would be the first diverse law professor at Harvard. So what's another lie to her? Where's the downside for her in conning the peasants into voting for a little loot and plunder?

Meanwhile let us all look with disdain upon the educated ruling class, of which Sen. Warren is a perfect exemplar. They tell us they are all for justice, for fairness, for science, for saving the world. But really they are just like any ruling class since the dawn of time. They are into power, they want power, and will do whatever it takes to obtain that power and keep it.

Until.

Until the land fails to yield its bounty, because the productive and the creative have been stripped of their seed corn, because of the looting and the plunder of the ruling class and its supporters.

And the whole cycle begins again. With new rulers.