Californians are getting ready to vote next month on Proposition 42, a measure that would forbid any future tax on wealth holdings. Gavin Newsom announced his endorsement of the proposal a few days ago, adding his voice to those of tech billionaires who sponsored the measure, as well as the Wall Street Journal editorial board, in opposition to the possibility of any tax on wealth as opposed to income.
The reasons they cite are essentially the same old penguin ones we've discussed before. They point out that billionaires may simply leave the state to avoid paying. California will experience capital flight and end up poorer in public revenues than it was before the wealth tax. As the richest burghers among the Penguins intone, in Anatole France's novel Penguin Island:
The poor live on the wealth of the rich and that is the reason why that wealth is sacred. Do not touch it, to do so would be an uncalled for evil. You will get no great profit by taking from the rich, for they are very few in number; on the contrary you will strip yourself of all your resources and plunge the country into misery.
France, ever the humane liberal and skeptic, is being ironic here. He has another character respond at this point: "I ask that this speech be graven on bronze. It is spoken for the future; in fifteen hundred years the best of the Penguins will not speak otherwise."
The Wall Street Journal op-ed page followed up yesterday with its own version of the Penguin speech. They lumped in California's proposed wealth tax with single-payer health insurance and various other left-wing economic proposals under the heading of creeping socialism and "soaking the rich."
Citing turmoil this week in France, their columnist opines: "Soaking the rich hasn’t solved the fiscal problems of European welfare states. Instead, it has stunted economic growth and, in turn, tax revenue[.]"
This speech could have come straight from the lips of Bertrand himself, the pretentious Tory jackanapes in Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim.
Amis (a socialist—well, if we're being honest, Communist—at the time he was writing this first and greatest of his novels), has Bertrand state, of the postwar Labour government: 'But their home policy... soak the rich ... I mean ...’ He seemed to be hesitating. ‘Well, it is that, pure and simple, isn’t it? I’m just asking for information, that’s all. I mean that’s what it seems to be, don’t we all agree? I take it that it is just that and no more, isn’t it?"
He proceeds to expand upon his objection to Labour's tax policies: '[S]hall I tell you what else I happen to like? Rich people. I take pride in the contemporary unpopularity of that statement. And why do 1 like them? Because they’re charming, because they’re generous, because they’ve learnt to appreciate the things I happen to like myself, because their houses are full of beautiful things. That’s why I like them and that’s why I don’t want them soaked. All right?'
Amis's protagonist, Jim Dixon, speaks for us all at this point when he reflects to himself that "Bertrand's speech [...] had annoyed him in more ways than he'd have believed possible."
There is a profound irony in the tech billionaires lining up to oppose California's wealth tax, since they are the ones always telling us we should support AI development—even if it leads to job loss—because it will generate so much abundance for everyone. When we ask: how will that abundance be shared with the public, if they are out of work? How will it not just end up in the hands of a few? The tech billionaires respond: Well, it will have to be redistributed in part.
Okay great. Here's a proposal for redistribution, then. And see who's opposing it!
Look, it's been a long time since I believed in the imminent fulfillment of the promises of international socialism myself. It's been many years since I stopped holding my breath for the revolution and the coming of utopia. But I always swore to myself that just because I no longer believed a social order of perfect justice and happiness was possible for human beings, that didn't mean I would resist efforts to make our current order a bit more just than it is today.
A one-time five percent tax on billionaire wealth holdings seems like a very incremental and reasonable step toward a fairer distribution. It's not going to get us all the way to utopia; but just because it won't do that does not mean it's not worth doing at all.
My attitude is that of Vachel Lindsay, in his "Why I Voted the Socialist Ticket": I am unjust, but I can strive for justice. / My life’s unkind, but I can vote for kindness.
Perhaps it will always be the case that some inequality in social rewards is required as an incentive to production. That does not mean the inequality has to be this much of a chasm.
Perhaps it will always be the case that human beings are not so altruistic that they will labor indefinitely purely for the good of strangers. That does not mean society cannot be somewhat kinder than it is today.
I read Norman Mailer's Barbary Shore this weekend—his often-overlooked and forgotten second novel about socialism.
The book is indeed a strange one, featuring characters who belong to mysterious partisan organizations and serve unnamed masters, though from context clues, one eventually can piece together that they appear to include a Trotskyite ex–mental patient (Lannie); an ex-Stalnist, ex-CIA, current Trotskyite (MacLeod); an ex-Stalinist current CIA man (Hollingsworth); and an ex-Trotskyite amnesiac (the narrator).
Mailer's novel is typical of socialist argumentation in that it is extremely rational, materialistic, and scientific so long as it is denouncing the evils of capitalism and imperialism—but as soon as it pivots to explaining how the future age of socialist abundance and fraternity will come about, it can't help but simply posit a sweeping transformation in human nature—the anticipated source of which is never really explained.
Mailer, writing in the early 1950s, is sufficiently disillusioned to admit that such a mystic change in the average human conscience may never come about. He admits that it is possible that "Man is only capable of founding societies based on privilege and inequality."
He sees the problem of incentives under socialism. Mass industrialization and the abundance of consumer society requires productivity. But how do you motivate people to produce without a profit incentive—unless it is by means of compulsion? Hence, the tendency of all historical communist regimes to devolve into slave states, which Mailer describes in a perfectly clear-eyed way, without any lingering illusions about the world's really-existing "workers' states."
Mailer knows all this, and he knows that a society that produces abundance for all without either the incentive of the profit motive or fear of the police state would require the introduction of some new motive into human nature—some will to create out of pure universal fraternity and thirst for justice. But where is this mysterious transformation toward perfect altruism to come from?
"Well may it be that men in sufficient numbers and with sufficient passion and consciousness to create such a world will never exist," he writes. "If they do not, however, then the human condition is incapable of alleviation."
Here is the point at which the eschaton of the socialist revolution is revealed as the surrogate religion it always was (it certainly played that role for me as an adolescent). Because Mailer here sounds like no one so much as the Apostle Paul: "If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile, and you are still in your sins. [...] If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all men most to be pitied."
The conclusion that socialism is an illusion is to be rejected simply because it is abhorrent. As a Stalinist character says in Mailer's novel: "if you've been wrong, mark you now, if you've been wrong, then what of the decamillion of graves[?]"
If for this life only we have labored for the revolution, we are of all men most to be pitied.
There comes a point in adult life when you realize that just because a conclusion is repugnant, however, that does not mean it is false. It could indeed well be the case that humankind will always be more self-interested than the demands of socialism require.
But again, that does not mean the world cannot be better than it is currently, even if it will never be perfect. It does not mean, to quote Clough, "the labour and the wounds are vain."
Suppose human nature is unalterable at the extreme edges. That does not mean we cannot "vote against our human nature," as Vachel Lindsay advised. As he wrote:
Man is a curious brute—he pets his fancies—
Fighting mankind, to win sweet luxury.
So he will be, though law be clear as crystal,
Tho’ all men plan to live in harmony.
Come, let us vote against our human nature,
Crying to God in all the polling places
To heal our everlasting sinfulness
And make us sages with transfigured faces.
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