The War on High Earners

Things are getting very interesting!

Dr. Hussein Birdbrain has provided the link to Daniel Gross' piece over at Slate, "War on the Rich?" The basic meme here is that there's in fact no such thing as a war on wealth - it's a GOP sham.

To make that case, of course, leftists have to demonize conservative and "John Galters" as "stupid," or worse. Check out Jesse Taylor, for example:

I one day hope to earn enough money to consider acting like an irrational asshole and having it become national news ...

Steve Benen has a wrapup of why this is economically stupid, but what I wanted to talk about is this bizarre idea that going John Galt is in any way intelligent or feasible. John Galt is an expression of narcissistic self-destruction, the central character in a novel that expresses undeveloped adolescent frustration with being so fucking great that the world can’t even handle your greatness. Going John Galt requires you to be simultaneously so successful that it matters whether or not you do it, and so dumb that you’d consider making yourself worse off than you’d ever be under the terrible plan you’re avoiding. You imagine these lawyers, dentists and others, incapable of doing basic math yet possessed of sets of specialized skills, shuddering in the face of adversity as simple as having to mail in a rebate form while simultaneously rubbing their fingers over their tax returns, their top 2% Adjusted Gross Income proof positive that they’re smarter and of more use to society than the mechanic they screamed at because sparkplugs are fucking made up bullshit and everyone knows it.

What's interesting about this is not just Mr. Taylor's profane excoriation of market conservatives who might not want the state taking MORE of their money (on principle that they would rather reduce their own productivity than feed the freedom-crushing the beast of the state), but also that as evidenced by his link to Wikipedia, I'm betting Mr. Taylor's never read the book.

Of course, Matthew Yglesias hasn't read it, but that didn't stop him from attacking the "nightmare scenarios" of the revolt of the "titans of high finance."

The non-book reading collectivists are like that though: Kick, cuss, and then confiscate, and then let the commissariats sort out the rest

Man it's going to be a long four years...

Hat Tip: Common Sense Political Thought.