Obama And ‘Punitive Liberalism’ Explained

This article by Roger Kimball is a must-read, must-link and must-forward piece.
Kimball outlines the horrible guilt liberals feel when anyone succeeds, and their weird zero-sum attitude that any such success must have come at someone else’s expense. There is no math or science to it, it is simply emotional vapors. It leads to anti-rationality: for example, the idea that taxes should be raised simply to punish the rich and successful, even if it generates less revenue for government. It is an appeal to emotion and base envy, is anything but ‘fair’, and actually works at cross-purposes with the public good. Not surprisingly Obama believes in it wholeheartedly:

ABC’s Charlie Gibson . . . observed that raising taxes led to decreased revenues: “Well, Charlie,” Obama replied, “what I’ve said is that I would look at raising the capital gains tax for purposes of fairness.”

That is liberal economics in a nutshell: put shackles on the wealthy simply so the rest of us don’t feel so bad.
Crossposted from Ken McCracken