The Tragedy of the Squid Farms on Mars
5th December 2018
Sarah Hoyt shares some insights.
You see, part of the problem is the mental framework. To the left any money earned anywhere in the country automatically belongs to the government. This confirms my suspicion that at heart, deep inside, they think of the normal form of government as feudalism. This is because I’ve seen very old land deeds and other documents from when Portugal was a monarchy and it read something like “his majesty, graciously allows his subject so and so to exert ownership over this parcel of land” the underlying conceit being that the whole land of the whole country belonged to the king, and it was in his purview to hand it out to whomever he pleased for as long as he pleased, while it still belonged to him. (The documents I saw were for things like house plots, not fiefdoms, incidentally.)
The left seems to be going off the same book when they say things like “How will you pay for the tax cuts?” as if the government is OF COURSE entitled to all your money, and if you’re getting some back, that part must be compensated for.
This goes hand in hand with their idea only the government does anything worthwhile, including demanding the president (at least if Republican) do something about things over which he has no power. “What are you going to do about unemployment?” “What are you going to do about anti-semitism” or “What are you going to do about hurricanes?” (The later and the whole antropogenic global warming climate change obsession, btw, give new meaning to the “everyone complains about the weather, but no one does anything about it” joke.)
Because of these frameworks, they miss what taxes cost.
The rest is well worth reading but I’m attracted by the connection of the Left’s mental model of property rights with that of — well, not feudalism, actually, but the ancient Roman concept of dominium. This concept, which the U.S. inherited from Britain, underlies such legal institutions as eminent domain — if all land belongs to the sovereign (i.e. the government), it has the right to take it for its own use (although the Constitution requires adequate compensation under the 5th Amendment, which the owner sometimes gets and sometimes doesn’t).
This fits in with my long-held believe that the Left isn’t really ‘progressive’ so much as it’s ‘regressive’ — it keeps trying to return to some sort of Good Old Days when people used bikes and trains and didn’t burn coal and oil.