"Bush's appalling tax cut reflects the belief that personal income is entirely private rather than subject to social claims."
Decades ago, during the early years of the Cold War, a Yugoslav dissident Communist, Milovan Djilas, wrote a manifesto against Communist rule called "The New Class". In it he charged that the "apparatus" of Communist rule was made up of a group of people who intermarried, looked out for each other, and in general, looted from the population to keep themselves in power.
Ayn Rand wrote the same thing in a different, more philisophical (if couched in fiction) way.
I contend that the Democratic Party is returning to its left wing traditions after a romance with Clintonian "centrism". Without Clinton around, there is little to keep the Hezboallah wing of the Party from reasserting control from the pragmatic Campaign wing of the party.
There is one thing that the dominant left wing culture of the Democratic Party believes in above all things: they have the right to rule and they have the right to loot.
Kuttner's statement is an appalingly frank admission that an individual is only as free as the State decides he must be. When a man's income is not his own, he is a slave. Pure and simple. Kuttner believes that his class of people has the right, indeed the duty, to determine what the level of social responsibility is of the entire population. Such is the conceit, the dangerous conceit, of liberals.
It is not that we don't have obligations to a larger society. It is that we have the right to determine, through the process of electing representatives to the Congress, what that obligation is. Kuttner, among others, wants to confine that decision making process to a few. Most people, if not forced to raise their own taxes, will keep most of their money for themselves. Kuttner's prescription for robbing the producers is to convince the people that the Democratic Party's left wing wants to "save capitalism". That's the whole thrust of his argument. But all he really is arguing for is a return to a politics in which liberal mandarins decide what is best for us by virtue of adjusting the tax code. In this way, the liberal project of making America more like socialist Europe will be advanced.
And I can't help but think back on Djilas' assertion that a New Class was founded to rule the Communist world. And I find the paralells with the modern leadership of the Democratic Party as compelling as they are eerie.
Be Seeing You,
Chris