Which is to say: Why do progressives believe that enacting economic policies that harm the wealthy will benefit the middle class? Presumably they believe this would help the poor, too, but Democrats do not talk about the interests of the poor very much of late. The Democrats are the party of the bourgeoisie, and Republicans are the party of the proletariat, or at least of the parts of it that do not live within 200 miles of a subway station.
Last week, I noted that Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren had suggested a new program of confiscating the assets of wealthy Americans on an annual schedule, a "wealth tax" with no constitutional basis and very little to recommend it economically. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has recommended a confiscatory income tax. Progressives have taken to describing the class of people they hate in eliminationist terms: Representative Ocasio-Cortez insists that it is "immoral" for "billionaires to exist." Two influential progressive economic thinkers, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, have written that one of the benefits of confiscatory taxes is that they would cause the class of high-income Americans to "largely disappear." Marshall Steinbaum, the research director of the progressive Roosevelt Institute, wrote: "It’s increasingly clear that having wealthy people around is a luxury our society can no longer afford."
(In a social-media post with more than one exclamation point, Steinbaum complains that I "attacked" him. The above quotation is the entirety of what I have written about him. It is not clear to me that the English word "attack" includes within its meaning quotation without further commentary.)
The rhetoric of elimination and the politics of resentment attached to it are dangerous and unworthy. "Okay," wrote one critic, "but what would you do about inequality?"