California Wealth Tax Proposal

I got this from Coyote blog. It was too good not to share here.

Sometimes a proposed law is so wrong and so destructive, but so typical of a certain philosophical bent, that I almost wish it would pass, if for no reason than to have an Atlas Shrugged-type object example of disastrous results. Such is the case for a California ballot initiative that has qualified for the signature-gathering stage. The initiative, in part: (full text linked here)
Imposes one-time tax of at least 55% on property exceeding $20 million of a California resident or held in California by nonresident. [note that this is an asset tax, not an income tax]
Imposes one-time tax (between 36.5% - 54.3%) on income exceeding $10 million when resident dies or leaves California.
Imposes additional 17.5% tax on total incomes of taxpayers with income exceeding $150,000 if single, $250,000 if married; 35% if incomes exceed $350,000 if single, $500,000 if married.
The proceeds of this money will be used to:
To purchase 30% to 51% of the outstanding shares of stock in ExxonMobil, Chevron, General Motors, Ford, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, and Citigroup, in order to ensure California has an uninterrupted source of energy and financial capital.
To drain and restore the Hetch Hetchy Valley to it’s condition at the beginning of the 20th century.
Use any Surplus funds to combat Global Warming, make infrastructure repairs and improvements, and to research alternative energy sources.
Beyond the unbelievably Marxist confiscation going on here, it begs the question of just what supply of energy and financial capital that California is not getting today that this will somehow ensure. The implication seems to be that ExxonMobil, GM, and Citigroup are too fair-minded, selling their wares too even-handily, and that California would prefer their attention tilted towards California.
Of course this initiative is profoundly immoral, so I can't do anything but deride it, but it would make for a spectacular object lesson (though one would have thought the Soviet Union's experience to be sufficient to this task, but apparently not). I am sure GM's troubles would be greatly helped by replacing its board of directors with the California State Legislature (the only American organization running a bigger deficit than GM) and replacing Citigroup's credit analysis with California social services bureaucrats. I would kind of like to see this in the same way I would love to see what happens if I threw a crate of fluorescent tubes off a 10th-floor roof -- I would never actually do it, because it would be unsafe and destructive, but I can still dream about how compelling the disaster would be.
Postscript: One could probably label this the Arizona and Nevada economic stimulation act and probably not be far off the mark.

If you follow the links and actually read the proposal it is breath-takenly absurd. ie:


The People of California find and declare all of the following:

a) The concentration of wealth in the hands of the few is inconsistent with the tenets of a democratic society.
b)Staggering sums of wealth have come to be concentrated in the hands of a tiny percentage of the population coinciding with growing poverty for tens of millions of persons, declining living standards and worsening economic security for tens of millions more.
[...]
e)Massive concentrations of financial power have fueled the globalization of the American economy, undermined America's traditional manufacturing, industrial and agricultural strength and substituted a class of money changers and speculators. The concentrated financial power has wholly undermined free democratic institutions, created a new breed of public office holder wholly beholden to it's power and reduced America to a debtor nation and a nation of debtors.

Aren't the tenants of a democratic society the fact that everybody has the freedom to do with their life what ever they want? Aren't there tens of millions of people that have started in poverty and have risen to be very wealthy? Have you ever seen the movie "The Pursuit of Happiness" with Will Smith? I just don't get this mentality. Sure everybody would like to better off, but at the expense of others?
And really do we really want to go back to the day when the US manufactured everything? I guess we are going to have to fire all the robots and machines that have taken that roll, so all these willing and able Americans can step in and do it slow and at a higher expense. I guess some peoples views of a democratic society is to take things away from those that have worked hard and give to those that don't.
Good Luck California