Doers And Takers

New York City’s new socialist mayor Zohran Mamdani recently took the oath of office, and offered with a smile an encapsulation of everything that’s wrong with progressivism, past and present:

We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.

The snarky part of me would quip that this “warmth” will be generated by burning Other People’s Money, and will, as Margaret Thatcher pointed out, be short-lived.

The rest of me contemplates how we got to this point.

The answer isn’t complicated or hard to fathom.

Decades of teaching the young that wealth is zero-sum, that one gets rich by taking from others, got us here. It’s why they feel it’s OK - more than OK - to take the money someone else earned and the wealth someone else created, by force. It’s why they feel victimized by the reality that life requires effort rather than empowered by the fact that systems that value liberty reward effort more than those that don’t.

They are abetted by earnest, naive, over-educated fools that think society can be improved by putting the Best-and-Brightest in charge. Setting aside the fact that politics rewards panderers and liars rather than truth-tellers and people who understand that there’s no free lunch, even the wisest of leaders cannot actively manage a nation better than millions of citizens pursuing their own interests and goals. As the history of the world proves, Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” is far superior to every other system yet conceived.

Unfortunately, because the invisible hand does not produce perfect outcomes, the earnest, naive, over-educated fools continually insist that it can be done better. They gin up alternate explanations for the society-elevating success created by capitalism, blame capitalism for Bad Things caused by distortions and Not-Capitalism, and use anecdotes rather than data to justify their “I am a better person” antics and policies.

I’ve said it time and again: voting to take someone else’s money to help people does not make you a better person.

I am not alone in observing this.

It makes you a taker. A societal parasite, even if you don’t keep for yourself that which your proxies in the government take at your insistence.

Most of human history is about societies growing their wealth in a zero-sum fashion. By taking from other societies, and thus impoverishing them or wiping them out, or by engaging in mercantilist “nations are businesses” behavior that focused on exporting goods and accumulating money. When Smith explained that wealth was what was produced in excess of subsistence, that wealth can be grown, and that win-win exchanges are the means to do that, societies that adopted that approach flourished.

That this requires the power-hungry to limit themselves is the chief problem. The sorts of people that go into politics don’t like the notion of simply being market referees, protecting rights but otherwise staying out of things. So, they do what politicians have always done:

Lie.

They promise that they can improve on the system that history shows works best. Some of them even convince themselves of that lie.

They sell the lie to the disaffected, and people that believe themselves better than the riffraff they share society with devote much time and energy to supporting the lie.

I get it. It’s naturally human to want to do better. We are social creatures, wired to feel good when helping others. Unfortunately, that wiring opens the door for con artists. If we can get that dopamine hit that comes from helping others by simply voting it so, that’s a lot easier than doing the work ourselves, and a lot cheaper than donating the fruit of our own labor.

Somewhere, deep down, our lizard brains recognize the corruption. This prompts our forebrains to concoct rationalizations, such as “taxes are the price we pay for living in a society,” no matter that voting to take from Jimmy to give to Joey is nothing more than authorizing theft from Jimmy.

Notice, by the way, that it’s never enough. The American tax code is one of the most progressive in the First World. Our society takes more, proportionally and in absolute terms, from the wealthy than any other big industrialized nation. In contrast to Europe’s welfare states, where everyone is taxed out the ying-yang, America’s lower economic tiers receive far more than they contribute. By some estimates, 60% of the nation’s households get more from the Federal government than they pay, meaning they don’t even contribute to the basic services of government.

Tell me again how the rich need to pay their fair share.

Shouldn’t “the price we pay for living in a society” apply to everyone, even if only a little?

Is it any surprise that we are now a society of two types of people: doers and takers?

Show me one advocate for socialism who believes he should be on the “from” side of Marx’s infamous aphorism:

From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.

and I’ll show you a thousand who believe they should be on the “to” side.

Socialists are grifters. They want their lives subsidized by the fruit of others’ labor, and concoct a litany of rationalizations as to how this is moral or proper or better. And when a snake oil salesman with a thousand watt smile comes along and extols his new and improved form of socialism, the grifters see dollar signs and the chance to be even bigger takers than they already are.

The worst part is that it won’t work. We know it won’t, because it’s been tried so many times before, with universally bad outcomes. Even the Nordic nations that the likes of Bernie Sanders point at suffered when they went socialist, and only began to recover by restoring free-market principles.

Nations do not tax their way to prosperity. They tax their way to decline. When the takers outnumber the doers, the inevitable outcome is decay.