Giving In

Some time back, I read about tactics used by Communist interrogators during either the Korean or Vietnamese war. They would engage in months of dialogue with American prisoners, normal dialogue that was, in any particular moment, innocuous. They would discuss realities, including the imperfections of both sides’ systems. Weeks or months later, they would circle back to those conversations with “you said this” reminders, framed to trap the prisoners into admitting the West’s system of liberty and capitalism was flawed and problematic, and to get them to eventually denounce the West in public statements. This relied on several elements of human nature, including the desire to be consistent and the desire to be reasonable.

It also relied on relentlessness.

There’s a Greek aphorism, rooted in ancient culture:

that translates to “he who persists, wins,” or “persistence conquers.” There are many variants of it in various cultures - and in pop culture. Among my favorites is this moment from The Shawshank Redemption.

Persistence, relentlessness, perseverance, doggedness, or whatever you want to call it, is an attribute that can be used to great success.

For good… or for evil, unfortunately.

We are witnessing the latter in real time, these days. Abetted by organized disinformation and agitprop campaigns by foreign governments and other underhanded players, highly energetic socialism-minded pundits, politicians, and social media clowns are fire-hosing us with garbage ideas, and the constant soaking is achieving its goal.

Why have I concluded this?

Because I see people who should know better starting to suggest that “you know, maybe taxing billionaires’ wealth isn’t such a bad idea...”

To name just one of several current bits of agitprop.

The campaign against billionaires is, at its heart, a campaign against the premise of private property. It’s a backdoor to the validation of the state seizing private assets - everyone’s private assets, not just those of a few billionaires. It’s a mind game, intended to alter our perception of how a society should function.

It starts with something that sounds reasonable.

“Some billionaires leveraged the government to become rich.”

Yes, indeed, cronyism/corporatism (I hate the misleading term “crony capitalism”) is a bad thing, and a truly capitalist society would have none of it because the government would be a detached, blind, and impartial arbiter and rules-keeper. Yes, indeed, we may properly criticize businesses that seek competitive advantage by lobbying the government to bend the rules in their favor, that convince politicians to steer contracts their way... or while we’re at it, that sell services to the government at all. It’s all a matter of degree. It’s no different than being annoyed at persons or companies that take maximum advantage of the tax code to minimize the taxes they pay.

Thing is, barring actual fraud or other criminal activity, they’re simply playing the game by the rules written by the people you and I put into office. Who deserves blame for that? The player? The rules-makers? Or the people who hired the rules-makers?

Elon Musk was a hero and darling when he was “saving the planet” with his electric cars. Ironically, that was his most crony-ist period, when subsidies and mandates and a government that was hell-bent on forcing us to buy battery-mobiles were ascendant. Once he started barking about waste, once he dared agree with Trump about inefficiency, once he got “too rich,” and of course the moment he touched Twitter, he became a villain. Not just a villain, but a Bond villain, the personification of the enemy for the young fools who are fire-hosing the anti-billionaire message.

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The reality, of course, is that they just want his money. As is typical for socialists, they don’t believe in wealth creation, just wealth confiscation. The fact that liquidating his entire net worth would fund the government for only six weeks - and deprive the government of all the revenue streams that wealth generates forever after, and make the nation poorer, and harm countless thousands employed by and who benefit from his companies - is of no matter to them, of course. It’s entirely an envy play. The lure is the punishment. He wronged them by failing to use his success to promote socialism, so he must be torn down.

That’s too baldly crass to admit, even to themselves, so instead they concoct narratives that paper over that base and repugnant reality. “Stolen wages,” “undeserved wealth,” “he didn’t earn his billions,” “stolen ideas,” “taxpayers are owed a piece of his fortune,” “he didn’t build that.”

Narratives repeated so often that they have worn down those who know they are merely seeds of destruction.

When I see people posting, “can we figure out how to separate the billionaires who are self-made from those who got rich off government cronyism?,” I know the liberty movement is in big trouble.

Such questions are giving in to the notion that the government should take even more of people’s money. That we should be taxed harder than we already are.

Rather than demanding that they get their our books in order, that they tackle the trillion dollars in waste, fraud, duplication, and uselessness they flush down the toilet every year, that they make do with the $5T they already collect from us, and that they stop doing crap that makes things worse rather than better, people who should know better are surrendering to the socialists. They are surrendering on the real argument: about how awful government is, and what we should be doing about that.

Persistence conquers.

If we allow the socialists to out-persist liberty, liberty will lose.

If we give in on further soaking the people who already pay the lion’s share of taxes, and makes the freeloader problem even worse (as Jeff Bezos suggests), we further normalize the socialists’ arguments - and further erode the core premises of individual liberty, self-ownership, and property rights.

Socialism requires slavery to the State and abolition of the premise that what you earn belongs to you. The long-game goal of the socialists is to get us used to the idea. They are doing that by relentlessly nibbling away at our core principles, making each incursion seem reasonable by itself. If we let them, we will eventually have none left.