How do we get universal medical care? First, we kill all the doctors. Well, not kill, but cut their pay and tax the hell out of them. That’ll encourage the best and the brightest to find a way to structure their incomes as stock appreciation never realized but borrowed against. Then we’ll have to start taxing unrealized appreciation. Oh, right, a wealth tax, which is what Comrade Warren — you know, the “capitalist to her bones” — wants anyway, in addition to the exorbitant taxes on high incomes.

I support higher taxes on high earners and higher estate taxes, but “high income” does not mean $250k. “High” means $10m. Of course, that won’t raise enough revenue to cover the Social Security increases Warren wants, but that’s the point. You cannot take all that money out of the economy without suppressing the economy in the process. Basically,warren’s plan takes money from winners to give to losers.That might make sense in a closed economy with no innovations in productivity. But this is not that economy. This is an economy where helicopter money given to the elderly becomes GDP on which taxes are paid. (Of course, being a mealy-mouthed politician, Warren just “asks” the rich to “pay their fair share.” She would never think of “making them pay what she wants.”)

The “responsible” left does not understand economics any better than the puritan right. Taxes do not pay for anything. Taxes simply suppress spending by those taxed so that their money does not compete for goods and services with the money spent by the government. Unless the economy is operating at full capacity, including the economies of places willing to export to us for and get paid in dollars, there is no reason to suppress spending by the rich in order to enable spending by the government. On the contrary, if we tax capitalists while we are creating demand for outputs, the outputs dry up, and the SS boosts cause inflation rather than access to more stuff.

My take on Ms. Warren is that she is driven as much by resentment as charity. She doesn’t just want to give money away; she affirmatively wants to take money away. She has not really established that you have to take money away to give money away. She just accepts that as a fact because it entails taking money away, and that’s just gravy on her messianic cake.