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| Biden and Sanders |
The Biden budget, and its ever changing proposals to tax billionaires, has been called by some the “Sanders’ Budget.” That designation is not farfetched.
Sanders is a socialist, not a progressive. He hasn’t changed
at all from his early years. Sanders spent his honeymoon in Moscow, when it was
not yet clear that the Soviet Union was economically in disarray. He visited
Nicaragua and there rubbed socialist shoulders with the Ortega brothers. He
never sharply criticized the Castro brothers after they had thrown into prison
their ideological opponents. The socialism of the Soviet Union, Nicaragua,
Venezuela and Cuba are all rooted in the politics of envy. It is what Friedrich
Nietzsche use to call “ressentiment” that gives life to both socialism and communism.
Nietzsche divided mankind into two classes: masters and slaves. The
world is best governed, he thought, by aristocrats. Their superiority always engenders
ressentiment among the slave class.
But Nietzsche, like Karl Marx a poet of the coming 20th
century, did not foresee that ressentiment may in a government of former slave turned masters flow downward to aristocrats as well, because
ressentiment, as the concept was understood by Nietzsche, is part of the human condition.
Once the slave has become a master, the resentment of the former slave rules
his heart and mind un-aristocratically.
The principal lesson of the 20th century is that the slave
become ruler is a much more vicious character than the aristocrat of previous
centuries whose rule may yet be benevolent. Stalin, in other words, was much
more menacing than, say, the aristocratic Borgias who ruled 12th century
Florence. Dante, a true Florentine republican, was exiled by the Borgias, but
the ruling elite did not send all republicans in Florence into reeducation
camps. It was Stalin, the progressive communist, who expanded the Soviet
re-education camps described by Alexander Solzhenitsyn in his Gulag
Archipelago.
The notion that the federal government should propose programs the
costs of which are to be borne entirely by billionaires is a step beyond
progressive-socialism. It trespasses into communism. And, of course, the
central pillar that upholds such economic absurdities is made of fairy dust.
The Sanders-Biden budget, which vastly expands spending – this while the US
economy is yet frozen in a recessionary embrace -- cannot and will not be borne
by billionaires alone.
The Sanders-Biden budget is teetering and tottering in the US Congress.
This socialist budget plan -- backed by “moderate” President Joe Biden, “moderate”
Speaker of the US House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi, “moderate” US Senate
leader Chuck Schumer, and self-proclaimed “progressives” such as former barkeep
Alexandra Ocasio Cortez of New York and Senator Elizabeth Warren of
Massachusetts – if it passes, will simply cripple the US economy.
The reason is simple: whatever you tax tends to disappear. If you
impose a punishing confiscatory tax on billionaires, billionaires will
disappear, usually in a puff of magic accounting smoke; if you tax profits, the
use that is made of profits – improving and expanding both products and the
labor used to produce products and services – will disappear. Creativity, the
motivating force that lies at the center of inventive capitalism, will
disappear as well.
But the ressentiment of the new masters will not disappear.
Though crowds of socialist slaves in Cuba and Venezuela today are
crying out for deliverance from their relentless communist masters, their desperate
cries will not reach the ears of Sanders, a hardboiled socialist, or the
“moderate” Biden administration, now on its way to Scotland, there to confer
with hardboiled European leaders watching in astonishment as hundreds of
thousands of the victims of South American socialist states pour over a
semi-permeable border effectively dismantled by a President who needlessly
surrendered Afghanistan to a terrorist organization, whose domestic policies
have boosted inflation and caused a labor shortage by entrapping workers into
taxpayer-financed quasi-socialist reservoirs from which they are not likely to
emerge any time soon. Both the costs of goods and services and the costs of
labor in the United States will be boosted by the progressive Biden-Sanders
inflationary budget.
These rising costs, in tandem with ever increasing debt, will in the
future impose upon the US Middle Class – not the rich – an insupportable burden
that will lead, as Friedrich Hayek warned in his prophetic book, The Road to Serfdom, to a severe
contraction in personal liberty.
In a chapter titled “The ‘Inevitability’ of Planning,” Hayek quotes
socialist-fascist Benito Mussolini on the point: “We were the first to assert
that the more complicated the forms assumed by civilization, the more
restricted the freedom of the individual must become.”
Biden, we are told by the Facebook and Twitter suppressed New York
Post, “is sending 13
senior administration officials and cabinet members to next month’s UN climate
summit in Glasgow, Scotland… a show of force, the White House said, to show the
US is working lockstep with their allies.”
Perhaps some well-wisher might be good enough to supply the group with
copies of Hayek’s book.
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