I am a good person, now shut up and give me your wallet. Last week, French, left-wing Berkeley professor Emmanuel Saez joined the ancient, hobbit-like former U.S. Secretary of Labor / present day left-wing social media influencer Robert Reich at a digital press conference to announce a new California ballot initiative: it’s the thieving class’s latest attempt at a wealth tax, which, if it makes it to Election Day in 2026, will target every billionaire who lived in the state in 2025. And now that a form of this legislation is bypassing both the state’s legislature and governor, appealing directly to voters, I believe it actually has a shot at passing.

It’s the whole “eat the billionaires” thing, which is always popular among the groundlings, but especially in times of decadence — and today we’re approaching Fall of Rome levels of decadent behavior. How else could our society stomach the visage of walking Lexapro advertisement Billie Eilish, the famous nepo baby and allegedly talented musician, demanding billionaires self-liquidate on behalf of some ad hoc version of morality that only ever targets people jusssst a little wealthier than the wealthiest Hollywood celebrity? And how else could Billie believe, with a reported net worth of something like $50 million, that she is a good person for saying this before a crowd of suicidally depressed retail workers who will never have even 1/100th of what she has? It’s a degree of clown world pageantry the average American could never stand were we not already up to our necks in cultural slop.

Anyway, and fortunately for the slop enjoyers among you, I’m not here to debate a mentally ill, attention-obsessed rich kid pop star about the right of a man to make money. Sure, the combined wealth of all American billionaires today, somewhere between $5 and $7 trillion, is totally dwarfed by the over $38 trillion of debt our politicians have stolen from your children — and their children, most likely. And yes, that means we could liquidate every billionaire today and nothing (not one thing) about your life would improve tomorrow. But hating billionaires isn’t about fixing the country, so why waste my time explaining this won’t fix our country? Hating billionaires is about hating billionaires. It’s a socially acceptable way to request horrible things happen to people who own a lot of things you want, which is a practice that has always been attractive to lower vibration humans.

Still, America’s overall sense of economic anxiety is not only real, but understandable, if probably almost entirely rooted in the average American’s inability to buy a home. So defending Elon Musk’s right to another dollar is just never going to resonate. It doesn’t matter that billionaires are being used as a scapegoat by politicians from both of our major political parties, who are actually themselves responsible for the cost of homes in this country following like seven decades of counterproductive policy, in everything from environmental review and zoning laws to open borders. The groundlings just hate rich people, and want them to suffer. I get it!

But something we should all care about is our own property, and the institution of a wealth tax changes our relationship with the government in such a way as the actual concept of private property — of you having property that actually belongs to you — no longer exists.

Everything’s right there in the architecture of this latest monstrosity out of California:

The two named proponents of the yet unnamed state proposition are Jim Mangia, President and CEO of St. John’s Community Health, a massive grifty Los Angeles-based NGO almost entirely indirectly funded by Medi-Cal, California’s Medicaid program, and Suzanne Jimenz, the Chief of Staff for Service Employees International Union, which should give you a pretty good sense of where this is coming from. Today, terrified of the state’s growing inability to fund its overly-extended healthcare promises, and staffed by a massive bloated army of union bureaucrats, socialists face a terrible choice: reform our unsustainable healthcare system, or eat the rich, go broke a little later, and then (I guess?) eat whoever’s left. Naturally, they’re laser focused on the most self-destructive possible thing, and framing it in populist language all but guaranteed to resonate among the state’s ever-larger population of net recipients.

Let’s just table the question of whether it’s morally justifiable to demonize 200 people and then punitively seize a bunch of their things in order to only temporarily fill a hole in your “free healthcare for illegal immigration” budget (a real thing we’ll circle back to in a moment). It’s important to break down what is actually meant by a wealth tax, because the equal protection clause still exists. That means if this law passes, and is then upheld in court, there is probably nothing stopping its expansion at the state level, which is what Democrats in California have tried for years, including last year with AB 259, and what both Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders called for at the federal level back in 2019.

A wealth tax extends beyond new income to everything you own, all of which has already been taxed. Practically speaking, this means any target of the tax would have assessed every piece of real estate they’ve purchased (which is already being taxed annually), every dollar of income they’re saving (which has already been taxed), every piece of art, jewelry, clothing, and every other piece of property in their homes (for which tax has already been paid), and every share of every company, including most perniciously every unrealized share of every company they hold. Then, a bureaucrat will determine the total value of this property, demand 5% of this value be paid to the government in cash, and if the target of this tax doesn’t have the cash available — because, say, he hasn’t actually sold his stock or land for any number of reasons including, for example, the property is presently valued at less than what he purchased it for — he will be expected to sell his property, if even at a loss.

Accepting a state income tax is a choice we make every year. The same is true for property tax, which we accept, if begrudgingly, when we purchase a home, or any number of consumer goods. In 2020, when the California government set to terrorizing California citizens, close to 1 million people packed up their shit — which they owned — and left. Yes, they were still responsible for income that they made in California that year, but their property belonged to them, and they could leave with it at any time they wanted.

There is no such escaping a retroactive wealth tax like what we’re looking at in California, which was designed with capital flight in mind. And in any world where this tax is triggered even once, and then legally upheld, there will never be any amount of money you can pay to finally own the shirt on your back. That shirt can, and will, be slowly chipped away forever. This means, in just a very obvious sense, your property is no longer something you own, but something you lease from the government. That should horrify us all, regardless of how many spaceship / robot / artificial intelligence companies we’ve founded.

In 1913, Congress ratified the 16th Amendment, which reworked language surrounding direct taxation, and paved the way to our first permanent federal income tax. Today, this is the closest comp we have to a wealth tax, in that it also can’t be avoided provided you have any kind of income, though the income a person is permitted to keep by our government does at least belong to them forever. Or, for now.

Back when the tax was first implemented, it affected something like 2% of the wealthiest Americans, with the government seizing between 1% and 6% of that small minority’s annual income. The policy was wildly controversial at the time, considered by many an unthinkable, and even tyrannical overreach of federal authority. But that unthinkable overreach passed into reality in a populist Trojan Horse, and on promises to never target anyone other than those evil rich assholes we all want to screw, before rapidly expanding in scope. Today, federal income tax targets basically every net productive member of society, with our government taking between 10% and 40% of income.