Elsewhere, another arm of federal authority signed into law a budget package that requires taking money from unwitting private taxpayers and placing it in a disastrous get re-elected scam.
It's always fun to listen to Steve talk about this stuff: he wants so much to be able to laugh at the absurdity. The WSJ has been on a tear lately -- today it headlines one section with a long article about the underground economy. Well, yeah -- when it's this expensive to do things "by the book" people find, er, alternatives.
Earlier this week the Journal took apart a central tenet of the current regime's ideology. The budget proposal actually makes explicit the pseudo-moral "logic" that makes it necessary to reverse income inequality, even if it means adopting measures that will make everyone poorer. Subject to central planners. Equal in our poverty. (Except for politicians, natch -- they get to keep their corporate jets.)
But back to why this stuff is more scary than funny: the document includes an explicit appeal to class resentment with a balls-out call for wealth redistribution. They're uniters, not a dividers! And never mind that high earners have increasingly been small-businesses filing taxes as individuals, artificially inflating the incomes registering at that end of the spectrum.
These are the same people who declare, with straight faces, that deficits have been used to finance tax cuts for the wealthy. Which is a nonsense: one doesn't finance a tax cut, one finances spending. And for years most federal spending goes out in the form of welfare checks. Checks are payments which must be financed. To characterize tax cuts as if they were payments is about as dishonest as, well, characterizing welfare payments as tax cuts.
But who would ever have the audacity to make such an Orwellian claim? (Oh yeah, we've seen it done -- without challenge!)
Getting past the routine dishonesty of the rhetoric, you can't help but be scared by the substance: the assumption that every dollar earned by anyone is first and foremost the property of the Nanny State. Any change (ha ha) you get to keep is considered a cost to the government. A cost! To them! Retain more than half the fruits of your labor and you will be committing a crime against greater society.
That's not just an immoral argument, it's a totalitarian philosophy.
But is totalitarianism a bad thing if half the population welcomes it? Heh, go read a history book. It's unsurprising that the government class would embrace this stuff; depressing that our intellectual class would celebrate it; downright tragic that the poor would (once again in history) be seduced by it.
Steve, get in here and find the humor in all this. Perhaps Jenia can teach us the tune to some of the old slogans of that other permanent revolution:
All Forces to the Sowing Campaign!
Do Not Allow One Kulak to Interfere with the Spring Harvest!