I have to ask the question here, because the quote by Virginia Congressman Jim Moran has gotten exactly no play in the MSM:
We could beg all sorts of intellectual and philosophical question here, and you all know what they are.
But the grim question, as always, comes down to this: when you start saying that people do not have a right to dispose of the wealth they have earned any way they damn well please, you get into the issue of who decides how much is too much, and who decides who should get how much.
The commonest liberal/progressive response to anyone who raises this question (at least in these Lakoffian days) is to fall back on the narrative that people who want to keep their wealth are freeloaders unwilling to pay their fair share of the cost to keep America running.
That, as they say in the game, is nothing more than talking points.
This is a completely different question than acknowledging the need for certain amounts of taxation. Congressman Moran is making a naked ideological statement that, in his opinion, property rights are not fundamental rights.
And that, my friends, is an inherently dangerous position.
We have been guided by a Republican administration who believes in the simplistic notion that people who have wealth are entitled to keep it and they have an antipathy towards redistributing wealth and they may be able to sustain it for a while but it doesn’t work in the long run.
We could beg all sorts of intellectual and philosophical question here, and you all know what they are.
But the grim question, as always, comes down to this: when you start saying that people do not have a right to dispose of the wealth they have earned any way they damn well please, you get into the issue of who decides how much is too much, and who decides who should get how much.
The commonest liberal/progressive response to anyone who raises this question (at least in these Lakoffian days) is to fall back on the narrative that people who want to keep their wealth are freeloaders unwilling to pay their fair share of the cost to keep America running.
That, as they say in the game, is nothing more than talking points.
This is a completely different question than acknowledging the need for certain amounts of taxation. Congressman Moran is making a naked ideological statement that, in his opinion, property rights are not fundamental rights.
And that, my friends, is an inherently dangerous position.
Comments
Spooky stuff. But hey -- he "knows" better than us what to do with OUR money!