Inspired, I guess, by the cascading disaster that is California’s recently proposed “billionaire tax” — a first of its kind private asset seizure, the threat of which alone triggered the largest wealth flight in state history — Senator Bernie Sanders just introduced a national asset seizure, which he’ll soon be floating in D.C. alongside Silicon Valley’s own bumbling sideshow Congressman “Traitor Ro” Khanna. As is ever their dishonest case, the stated purpose of the policy is to fund a variety of feel-good social welfare gifts. But, with an itty bitty wittle annual 5% seizure of every billionaire in the country’s property, the policy is designed to eradicate the concept of private property in general (an argument I detailed in November), and the concept of the wealthy businessman in particular. Such ideas, once safely quarantined on the very fringe left, are now supported by the entire leftist wing of the Democratic Party, and not because men like Bernie are stupid, or insane. But because technologists and entrepreneurs tend to be idealists who believe in the concept of liberty, while Democrats have a theory of power.

The targeting of billionaires has nothing to do with helping the poor. Billionaires are targeted because they constitute power, have signaled a drift from political orthodoxy into political diversity over the last few years, and now represent one of the only potential checks on institutional, predominantly left-wing power in the country — whether they are blind to this power or not. Fortunately for those among you tired of my conspiracy theories (which have only ever been correct), I won’t need my whiteboard to connect these dots, as the left has recently grown more confident in its political prospects, which has led to some recent sloppy honesty.

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Last month, in Munich, when pressed on her future presidency, socialist Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez giggled, and proposed a national asset seizure in the vein of California’s, which, her interviewer cheerfully added, would be impossible for Americans to evade; just a couple weeks ago, Senator Gallego explained — did not threaten, but calmly explained — the Democratic Party’s intention of dismantling tech companies that merged while Trump was president, to my eye obviously signaling crosshairs over Elon Musk; and a few days after that, Senator Chris Murphy explained his party intends to abuse antitrust law to reverse recent inroads by moderates in media, targeting Paramount’s acquisition of Warner Bros. in particular, as Bluesky Nation melted down over the looming threat of Bari Weiss, their Joseph Goebbels, influencing CNN.

In all of this, obviously, we see the naked grab for power over ideological consistency — I couldn’t help but notice Murphy didn’t seem to have a problem with the famously “woke” Disney, for example, which owns ABC. But more interesting still is the way in which recent policy proposals target wealth at the expense of the left’s own stated goals. In this way, targeting American billionaires in general, a group of people worth less than a fifth of our total national debt, has never made much sense. You could liquidate the bunch, and not a single American would feel it. But nothing has been so clear a gateway to the truth as the California wealth tax in particular, which can’t possibly be understood in the terms with which it is explicitly discussed.

First, by their own admission, the union’s ballot proposition is meant to be a one-time asset seizure for a chronic funding problem. That means it can’t solve the union’s stated problem even if billionaires, the most effortlessly mobile people on the planet, stick around and pay (narrator’s voice: they’re leaving). In my first piece on the subject, I even naively pointed out the cause of the state’s healthcare funding shortage, as if anybody cared. As if someone might then say, oh, maybe we should pause the free healthcare for illegal immigrants we can’t afford.

But of course this was never about funding healthcare.