Barack Obama enthusiastically supports punishing the most productive members of society in order to put capital to less efficient uses. Put more simply, he wants to take money from the “rich” and give it to the “poor.”
I’m no fan of Obama’s tax plan, but what on earth justifies the assumption that the richest members of society are the most productive, or that their uses of capital are the most efficient?
No doubt that would tend to be true in a freed market, but in a system like the one we live under – a system of government-granted privilege to the corporate elite – it seems extraordinarily unlikely to be true; and indeed the evidence is pretty overwhelmingly to the contrary.
Maybe someone should buy Bothwell a copy of Kevin’s book?
I saw Michael Cannon of the Cato Institute on the news tonight making an eminently left-libertarian point: while many tobacco companies oppose the new restrictions on cigarette advertising, the nation’s largest, Philip Morris, supports it – because restrictions on advertising benefit major brands at the expense of smaller, lesser-known brands that have more need to advertise. While Congress postures as an opponent of Big Tobacco, Cannon noted, in practice it consistently supports it, even through its purportedly anti-smoking policies.
The late Murray Bookchin famously claimed that the gap between “social anarchism” and “lifestyle anarchism” was unbridgeable. Over at IAS, John Clark has an