Month: November 2010

After winning in Kentucky last night, Rand Paul was talking to CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, who dutifully repeated a Democrat talking point: “What if they just raised taxes on the richest, those making more than 250,000 dollars a year?” In answering the question, Paul invoked a basic argument against class warfare as an economic policy:

We all either work for rich people or we sell stuff to rich people. So just punishing rich people is as bad for the economy as punishing anyone. Let’s not punish anyone. Let’s keep taxes low and let’s cut spending.

As Ronald Reagan used to say, “No poor man ever gave me a job.” Whether as employers, consumers or investors, “the rich” are essential to economic growth and a policy of punishing wealth will therefore have the effect of discouraging investment and employment.

The demonization of the rich is, however, so essential to the liberal worldview that no matter how often their confiscatory schemes produce bad results, they never learn. Either you believe in class warfare, or you stop being a liberal. Lee Fang at Think Progress therefore attacks Rand Paul as “a protector of the privileged class.”

Yeah. And never mind the “privileged class” who pay the bills at the Center for American Progress.

UPDATE: Chris Wysocki takes notice of the expectation that Republicans should compromise, even though “We drank their beer, stole their horses, and danced with their women.” 

Where were these demands for compromise when Nancy Pelosi was calling the shots?

UPDATE II: Kathy Kattenburg of the (badly misnamed) Moderate Voice thinks she’s cute:

No poor man ever closed a factory and shipped all the jobs to Southeast Asia, either.

Why does Kathy hate Southeast Asians? Less facetiously, why does Kathy believe that, once a factory is opened in the United States, that it should never close? Like any other business — restaurants or shoe stores or whatever — factories start up and shut down all the time, everywhere all over the world.

Why this liberal intellectual fascination with factory jobs which — in point of fact — these intellectuals never worked at? I believe it is because the factory worker occupies a special place in the Left’s iconography. “Workers of the world unite!” has a lot better ring to it than, “Grocery clerks of the world unite!” or, “Dental hygenists of the world unite!”

This reflexive celebration of “workers” (as if no one except factory employees actually works for a living) was always blinkered nonsense, but it now has the extra advantage of being nostalgic blinkered nonsense.

Liberals now expect to be taken seriously when they harken back to the “good old days” of factory smokestacks belching carbon emissions into the sky and spewing, while all-white-male unionized workforces built big steel gas-guzzling cars with tail fins and no seat belts. The coal to run those factories was strip-mined, of course, and the gasoline contained lead. This was the industrial heyday of America — the early ’60s, when JFK was president, when women stayed home and raised babies, when minorities were effectively frozen out of high-wage union jobs, and when corporal punishment was routine in public schools where the dropout rate was much higher than it is today.

Somehow, the decline of Industrial America always gets blamed on Republicans (“Reaganomics,” sneers Kattenburg), but liberals absolutely hated the Industrial America whose destruction they now so loudly lament. That the shuttered factory in Michigan might have been rendered economically uncompetitive by liberal policies — regulations, taxes, unionization — is something they ignore, and instead blame on those evil greedy right-wing capitalists.

Kathy Kattenburg is a liberal, and being a liberal means feeling good about yourself because you are so much more sensitive to the plight of the downtrodden than everybody else. So she sneers at “Reaganomics” and Southeast Asians, and congratulates herself on her moral superiority.

It’s so much easier than actually learning anything about economics.