My Two Cents

A wealth tax is popular among voters for good reason: because they understand the system is rigged to benefit the wealthy.

— Elizabeth Warren

Senator Elizabeth Warren wants to soak the rich by taxing the 100 thousand richest Americans two cents on every dollar of their net worth.

While Congress bickers over spending $1.9 trillion for Covid-19 relief, Warren's "wealth tax" would over 10 years raise at least a trillion dollars more than that amount.

Warren wants to target the funds to education and child care.

Reactionaries—true to form—are screaming "property theft!"

But is it theft, when you soak the rich?

The slang term soak, which originated in the early 19th century, meant to "extort." English-speakers would refer to dishonest merchants as extortionists who soaked customers.

The phrase soak the rich came into English a century later, when James Warburg, a banker and critic of FDR, used the phrase to describe the president's populist income-tax proposals. 

Soaking the rich meant "stealing rich folks' property" for redistribution among the poor.

But philosophers would say you can't really steal money from the rich, any more than, say, Robin Williams could steal jokes from fellow comedians. 

Like a joke, money isn't property: it's an intangible. (A joke can't even be made theft-proof by insisting it's "intellectual property;" another standup can simply change the joke's setting and claim it's new, as Milton Berle often did.)

You might object and insist that, although it isn't physical property, an intangible like a joke can be owned—and therefore stolen. 

However, to argue as such would be to assign a special status to intangibles (i.e., they're "nonmaterial property"), an argument that opens to the door to a lot of absurd legal and moral claims—for example, that other people with your first name have stolen your name; or, worse, stolen your identity.

Soaking the rich comes down to depriving them of intangibles by denying them a few digits on a bank account, while helping millions of low- and middle-income Americans struggle less to educate and care for their children. 

But the rich cannot stand seeing even a few electrons behind a spread sheet evaporate, because with that disappearance not their tangible possessions, but their power, lessens. And power is what it's really about.

Keeping Up With the Kardashians and Downton Abbey have conditioned us to think the super-rich love only leisure and luxury. 

But make no mistake: it's dominion they love—dominion they garner largely on the backs of others.

Comedian Bob Hope once said of Milton Berle, "He never heard a joke he didn't steal." 

Jack Benny—known himself to steal from Berle—defended the practice, claiming, "When you take a joke away from Milton Berle, it's not stealing, it's repossessing."

Elizabeth Warren isn't stealing from the rich, either; she's repossessing.

That's my two cents.