California voters in November may well approve a 5% wealth tax on billionaires. This is not just another display of rage in the once Golden State, but is part of the global movement to impose massive taxes and financial controls on a global basis. Many people in California are looking for scapegoats for an economy in which a handful of people are doing extremely well while tens of millions barely make any headway in their incomes. Indeed, many households are falling behind.
The fact that the booming stock market helps everyone with a 401(k), IRA or retirement plan is overlooked when monthly bills come in or when would-be homebuyers are blocked by high mortgage rates. Health care costs continue to rise, as do college sticker prices.
Of course, experience shows time and time again that higher taxes destroy investment and lower living standards, especially for those on lower incomes. But what this movement in California, and others like it, is ultimately about is power.
The far left hates the idea of people doing business things and other activities without their permission. They want to micromanage the way you live. That is why socialism everywhere impoverishes people and sucks the soul out of a society. But modern socialists are very adept at exploiting grievances, fabricating doomsday scenarios, and writing twisted versions of history to discredit the past of the US and other Western nations.
The latest manifestation of modern socialism’s attack on free-enterprise capitalism comes from the French economist Thomas Picketty, who gained world fame several years ago with a best-selling book purporting to show that the world’s wealth is being concentrated and controlled by a small elite. This idea that the supposedly flawed internal dynamics of capitalism will bring about its own collapse goes back to Karl Marx in the 1840s, when he predicted that the system would make workers so abjectly poor that they would rise up and overthrow it, replacing it with a socialist paradise. Since then, the world’s population has increased sevenfold and global per capita income has increased 25-fold. So much for Marx’s denigration of the working masses.
While Picketty’s flawed math and methodology caused widespread controversy, his Marxist prophecy made him the toast of the left. Since then, there has been a global explosion in the number of millionaires and billionaires. Even more people would be much better off if governments stopped policies of excessive taxation, over regulation and currency instability.
Picketty has now come out with a plan entitled “Global Justice Report: A Blueprint for Equality and Prosperity within Planetary Limits.” It is supposed to tackle income inequality while saving the planet from climate change. The idea is that we are consuming too much of the earth’s limited resources. According to Picketty’s crackpot program, in wealthy countries GDP per capita will be reduced to $69,000. That’s $25,000 less than US$94,000.
Global GDP growth will be limited to less than half a percent. one-ninth of one percent of the US. The work week will be reduced to three days. World consumption would drop by a third. Huge taxes on incomes and wealth will be imposed to help the poorest countries. There would be a world central bank and a world currency under the auspices of the UN, and a huge supranational bureaucracy would be created to oversee it all.
Skeptics rightly point out that countries will not suffer these elements.
Picketty’s plan is a formula for communist tyrannies. It will impoverish the world, not save it. But Picketty’s premises are still accepted as truths in many quarters and will fuel future diseases like California.
These conditions, however, are false.
The earth does not have a limited number of natural resources that are depleted. What makes a resource useful is human ingenuity and creativity. Oil, by itself, is gloop. you cannot eat or drink it. Human ingenuity has turned this range into an energy resource that has greatly enriched the world.
Thanks to discoveries coming from the human mind, the amount of land needed for agriculture to feed the world is decreasing. If the rest of the world were as productive in agriculture as the US, about 350 million acres of land would be freed up. That’s the equivalent of ten Iowas.
The real resource in the world is the human mind, which has no limits to ingenuity and creativity.
