RUTHFULLY YOURS

Sen. Elizabeth Warren said on Wednesday October 13, 2021, that billionaires who have enough money to shoot themselves into space, as Jeff Bezos did this summer, will pay for the Democrats’ multitrillion-dollar reconciliation bill that is still being negotiated in Congress.

Before analyzing the pure envy and hatred of the productive benefactors of humanity that lie behind her statement, let us identify Warren for what she is: an equivocating, lying, money-laundering, Ponzi-scheming socialist who lives to expropriate the wealth of others to finance socialist programs. She’s contributed nothing in terms of productive value to society—short of being some pit-bull bureaucratic watchdog who lives for enacting legalized theft and money-laundering schemes, which is what socialism boils down to. She denies the fact that production comes before distribution, and that the wealth she so gleefully wants to appropriate was made possible by the ratified choices of individuals who endorsed Bezos’ products and made him wealthy because he added superlative value to their quality of lives. The notion that billionaires don’t pay taxes is such a case of the Big Lie, that it is not even worth refuting.

What Warren despises is that Bezos regards his personal welfare, enjoyment, and pleasure—all value-choices that comprise his pursuit of his own happiness which is his inalienable right to do with as he pleases. He neither seeks nor needs the permission of others to live optimally.

Elizabeth Warren is jealous, envious, and filled with rage that he has so much surplus income that he can dare to spend it on what she considers to be a frivolous and wasteful activity. Guess what, Warren? The liberal state by design is supposed to remain agnostic on the question of persons’ conceptions of the good life—provided such choices do not violate the rights of others. She is outraged that he’d rather spend millions on a short trip to space than fund the decrepit and corrupt government schools that teach hatred and bigotry via Critical race Theory; that he doesn’t seem to care about funding historically Black colleges which are a total disaster (they are failing abysmally and graduating semi-literate students); that her tuition-free community college education plan won’t be financed. No one should ever be compelled to finance the education of another person’s child. We are not responsible for the procreative choices of other people. The responsibility for a child’s education lies with the parents.

If you cannot afford to educate a child then don’t have one, just as you would not purchase a house or car if you could not afford to finance them. No one has a constitutional right to have children. And no one’s child can be a necessary social good for anyone but the parents of that child. State schools today (and many private schools) are bastions of indoctrination centers teaching hatred of our great republic, encouraging and practicing cancel culture, weaponizing defiance against authority, decolonizing courses by stripping them of canonical texts, and turning schools into Marxist conduits of Social Justice, radical activism, and social eugenics breeding grounds to transform America into a communist charnel house by canceling human agency, and then history, and then our Constitution. No, Sen. Warren. Some of us are going to devote our lives to defunding all public schools and shutting down government schools. She is incensed that she won’t have her drug-pricing policies and undefined “climate crises” funded and foisted on corporations that would just stifle growth and productivity.

Warren knows that she must walk a fine line with corporations and folks like Bezos. Financing socialist programs is not as simple a matter as taxing-the-rich and using their wealth to indiscriminately finance said initiatives.

What the bark-with-no-bite senator wants to do is create a certain climate of resentment against success within the culture. She wants to reorient the sensibilities of the American people, to divest them of their personal independence and the cherished principle that they hold regarding property: that one has the legal and moral right to use and dispose of one’s property according to one’s judgment and conscience, provided it does not violate the individual rights of other persons.

Warren and the progressive left want to change the vocabulary of rights entirely. They want a notion of positive rights to be sneaked in surreptitiously for us to forget the proper understanding of rights as delineated by classical liberalism. John Locke, John Stuart Mill, Ludwig von Mises, and Ayn Rand all reminded us that rights pertain to a right to pursue action in pursuit of a good, an object, a service, and values. No one has the right to a job, a house, or an education per se; only the right to pursue the means to such tangible goods. Otherwise, one is demanding that one has a right to the efforts and actions and services of another. No one has ever been able to justify on what grounds such a right to that sort of action could be legitimized.

Warren, like all socialists, is a money appropriator. She has no intention of creating real wealth in the sense of creating a real value in the world whose application is manifestly ratified by the choices of others in trading their money for that applied value. She may be a money-earner, and she has grown rich by that means; but it was through the created wealth of a producer on whose efforts she herself is parasitic. She is mostly known in politics as someone who has been responsible for policies that have led to banking regulations. This means that she strangles and aborts initiatives, innovation, and the creative capabilities of others.

And this is what she hates about corporate leaders and those who have the temerity to enjoy their wealth by traveling into space. This woman bears the trademark of every money-laundering socialist: she has a sense of entitlement coupled with hatred for talent that can be monetized. She does not even have the dignity of a pillaging humanitarian. She’s a primal thug who is going after the rich for no other reason than because they are rich, and because their sensibilities and drives are offensive to her. She feels the rich should give back. But to whom and for what reason? From whom have they stolen or taken anything that was not theirs legally? They have raised the quality of lives and standard of living of many in ways that, if such persons had been left on their own, many of them otherwise would have been condemned to a life of destitution. Bezos has nothing to give back. He and his customers have traded value for value in a reciprocal exchange of mutual advantage.

Warren desires to bring the rich and affluent down to the level of the lowest common denominator of those whom she thinks need government help; to invoke some notion that those corporate leaders and billionaires are just like everyone else. But they are not. And they should never accept the uninvited moral agenda of lesser people.

I end with words addressed to money-laundering Sen. Warren via the great economist Ludwig von Mises, spoken to philosopher Ayn Rand when he told her she had the courage to tell the masses the truth. Von Mises said: “You are inferior, and all the improvements in your condition which you simply take for granted you owe to the efforts of men who are better than you.”

These words are applicable to the money-appropriating senator who would do best to genuflect before the billionaires and pay homage to them for the gift of her paycheck, rather than have the infernal impertinence to even aspire to lecture them—let alone steal their wealth.

Jason D. Hill is professor of philosophy at DePaul University in Chicago specializing in ethics, social and political philosophy, American foreign policy, and moral psychology. He is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center. Dr. Hill is the author of five books, including the forthcoming book, “What Do White Americans Owe Black People: Racial Justice in the Age of Post-Oppression.” Follow him on Twitter @JasonDhill6.