There is something wonderfully clarifying about the modern command to “Eat the Rich.” It has the increasingly rare virtue of saying exactly what it means. The socialist has spent a century explaining that he merely wishes to tax the rich, regulate the rich, redistribute the rich, nationalize what the rich own, and occasionally parade the rich before congressional committees so politicians may scold them about greed.
Why endure all this tedious bookkeeping?
Just eat them.
If the existence of a man with $10 billion constitutes an injury to a man with $10, the obvious cure is not to ask how the first acquired $10 billion or why the second has only $10. Such questions reek of bourgeois moralizing. The enlightened solution is simply to eliminate the offending billionaire.
The advantages are obvious and immediate.
Inequality would plummet. Inequality, unlike poverty, can be cured without making a single poor person richer. If Elon has $10 billion and Fred has $10, the disparity is appalling. If Elon is eaten and Fred still has $10, statistical justice has nevertheless advanced magnificently. Fred remains broke, but he may take comfort in knowing Elon was last night’s entrée.
Housing would improve as well. Rich men frequently own several houses, an obvious outrage considering they can sleep in only one bed at a time. Once properly consumed, their houses could be distributed among the citizenry or, more realistically, occupied by the bureaucrats appointed to supervise their distribution.
Naturally, the program would require administration. One cannot simply have mobs roaming Connecticut with steak knives. We are a nation of laws after all.
Congress would establish the Department of Nutritional Equity, headed by a Secretary of Consumption and staffed with regional directors, advisory commissions, environmental consultants, appellate boards, and an Office of Culinary Justice. Within three years, its budget would exceed the wealth confiscated from the people it was created to consume.
This would be hailed as a success.
We should begin with the trillionaire and then the billionaires. They are sufficiently rare that almost everyone can hate them without fear of personal inconvenience. The difficulty arises when we run out.
Fortunately, history provides the solution: change the definition of “the rich.”
After the billionaires come the hundred-millionaires, then the ten-millionaires, then ordinary millionaires. Eventually someone will notice that a dentist owns a house, a boat, a retirement account, and a suspiciously late-model Lexus. He may protest that he worked 60 hours a week for 35 years to acquire these things, but this is merely Kafkatrapping — the louder and more frequently he denies his affluence, the more we know we are right.
Eventually we arrive at the most useful feature of redistributionist politics: “rich” has no fixed meaning. The “rich” man is simply the fellow who has more than you. Why should we be so fixated on numbers? We’re not accountants for goodness sake.
The economist, that tiresome fellow forever bringing arithmetic to a morality play, may object that consuming the people who accumulate capital, build companies, finance factories, hire workers, and invest in new enterprises might eventually produce less capital, fewer companies, fewer jobs, and fewer rich people available for supper.
This assumes wealth must be created before politicians can distribute it. The modern reformer has transcended such primitive thinking. Wealth simply exists, like granite or rain. The entrepreneur does not create it. He somehow intercepts it on its way to everybody else.
There remains, however, the stubborn problem of what happens after dinner.
Eventually the rich disappear. Investment declines. Capital flees. Businesses close. Tax revenues drop. The government discovers that the fellow it spent 20 years denouncing was also paying an astonishing portion of its bills.
The poor remain poor, but something important has nevertheless been accomplished; a treasured postmodern progressive goal has been attained. There are fewer rich people.
This is the peculiar genius of envy as economic policy. It can succeed completely by its own measurement while leaving everyone worse off. If your objective is prosperity, a society in which one man owns 10 houses while another owns one may be preferable to a society in which both live in huts. If your objective is equality, the huts represent progress.
There are alternatives. We might reward production, encourage entrepreneurship, teach useful skills, protect property, promote investment, and revive the unfashionable proposition that economic policy should make poor people richer rather than rich people poorer.
Unfortunately, this requires distinguishing inequality from poverty. Worse, it requires admitting that another man’s success is not necessarily the cause of your failure.
Cannibalism may prove easier to swallow.
So, eat the rich.
Just remember one thing — once they are gone, somebody poorer than you is going to get hungry.
Postscript:
Before you think I have lost my mind, this is my updated version of Jonathan Swift’s greatest satirical production, A Modest Proposal, utilizing a Democratic Socialist of America perspective. The conclusion of eating children is horrifying, but Swift has deliberately constructed an argument in which it follows from the dehumanizing premise.
Swift’s 300-year-old essay reminds me of the old Twilight Zone episode titled “To Serve Man.” Still, A Modest Proposal remains perhaps the archetypal example of political satire because Swift wasn’t merely trying to make his readers laugh at somebody. He was trying to make them uncomfortable with what their own reasoning implied.
Take someone’s premise seriously, remove all the comforting euphemisms, follow it consistently to its logical endpoint, and then ask: “Are you sure you still believe the premise?”
This process is considerably more sophisticated than simply calling our opponents cruel proglodytes, stupid libtards, or TDS sufferers. You just make their worldview indict itself.
It ain’t that hard to do if I, a victim of the Mississippi public school system, can do it.
