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.

After closer examination of the policy, the aspect I found most interesting became the manner in which it targeted future technology leaders — men who are not even currently billionaires on paper. As written, the ballot proposition disproportionately and unfairly targets private companies over public companies by taxing control of startups. It is common today for a startup founder to receive 10 or even 100 votes for every share of a company he owns, which the union’s wealth busters decided to interpret as a founder’s theoretical net worth. In other words, they are proposing a 5% tax on 10x or even 100x the abstract property many of these young men own. That is obviously absurd. That absurdity has been pointed out. The men responsible for the asset seizure have declined to amend their language.

Theoretically, if the ballot proposition passes, the only way out for a private-stage founder is to sell, in some circumstances, more of his company than he actually owns… or to rewrite terms with his investors, and give up his super voting rights. The unions would make no money off the founder, but the founder would lose control of his company. Now, why would a political coalition ostensibly interested in patching up a hole in the state’s healthcare budget care about voting rights at the expense of actually making money?

At first, many of us simply thought the wealth tax architects were stupid. But the simplest explanation is reducing the power of successful entrepreneurs is, more than raising money, the point. And we have a bit of evidence supporting the notion.

Last month, Pirate Wires’ Blake Dodge published a fantastic profile on the wealth tax architects, and identified a couple rare betrayals of what I believe to be their true intentions. Here, from Gabriel Zucman and Emmanuel Saez, academics cited in the union’s wealth tax:

“With tax rates of barely 23 percent at the top of the pyramid, wealth will keep accumulating with hardly any barrier. So, too, will the power of the wealthy, including their ability to shape policymaking and government for their own benefit.”

And then:

“And so everybody now understands what was long understood for centuries, very much including in the US, which is that extreme wealth is not virtual — it’s always extreme power. It’s the power to influence policy, it’s the power to influence the prevailing ideology, the power to influence markets and so on,” Zucman said. “And so there is always a tension between an extreme concentration of wealth on the one hand and the very possibility of democracy on the other hand.”

Power. Wealth is interesting, of course. But only insofar as it buys power. Power over politics, power over business, and power over culture, which in turn shapes politics. This — not ideology, or shorter term financial gain, but power — is the principal interest of the men who quietly run the state. They want it for themselves, and they fear it where they find it in anyone else.

I guess it’s a bit of projection. After all, there is no more powerful force in California politics than the unions, which are presently hijacking our democratic system, by the admission of the intellectuals underpinning their policy proposals, to target a class of people they perceive as their political enemies. But as wrong as they are in general (like, ethically), they’re right about the relationship between money and power. Of course wealth is power. This has always been true. It was unmistakably true a couple years ago, when Elon Musk bought Twitter, an event recalled by the average liberal in the same language as a victim of abuse recalling some heinous, historic trauma.

For years, Twitter set the national discourse. Every prominent journalist, christened with their blue check crown, lived on the platform. Provided their stories adhered to center-left orthodoxy, their work was amplified. When posters on the platform dissented, their opinions were suppressed, if not outright censored. The overnight eradication of ideological enforcement on social media was received by the Democratic Party as not only a net loss to Democratic Party power, but as an alarming sign of what could happen if every tech leader soured on their bullshit, as had Elon Musk. Additionally, California Democrats were already grappling with the influence of a revolting class of technologists on local elections, following the defeat, first, of infamous pro-crime District Attorney Chesa Boudin along with several unhinged members of the school board, and then our loser mayor London Breed, who was replaced — and I hope you’re sitting down for this — by a billionaire.

California’s wealthiest are not regarded by the architects of the “wealth tax” as McDonald’s Happy Meals with legs, bobbling about until our politicians decide they’d like a snack. That’s what the upper middle class is for. California’s wealthiest are regarded, correctly, as the only potentially existential threat to monopoly left-wing power in the state. The goal of the California unions and socialists fighting for the wealth tax is not, I think, to tax wealth, but to expel it from the state. This is not only because a handful of billionaires involved themselves in politics, a recent upward trend, and a target helpfully set by The New York Times. But because the technology companies being built in California are themselves founts of power. Search is power. Social media is power.

Artificial intelligence is, obviously, power.

Chairman Bernie, truly thick amidst his ‘happy as a pig in shit’ era, made headlines late last year for another little issue just a bit adjacent to the wealth tax: he now supports a national moratorium on the construction of data centers, and his position is gaining traction among leftists in Congress. California’s Lorena Gonzalez, the former state assemblywoman and current labor leader, believes there are “no ‘good’ AI companies.” And in the great (sclerotic, tragic, embarrassing) state of New York, the state senate Internet and Technology Committee just unanimously passed a bill to ban “licensed-profession guidance,” which is to say, from what I can tell, every practical use of artificial intelligence.

From Reason:

“S7263, as currently written, would not just apply to the licensed professions of psychology and mental health services, but to medicine, veterinary medicine, dentistry, physical therapy, pharmacy, nursing, podiatry, optometry, engineering, architecture, and social work as well.

“...S7263 would also hold chatbot deployers liable for chatbots that practice or appear as attorney-at-law, which not only includes representing clients and handling formal legal matters, but also merely offering legal advice.”

S7263 would virtually guarantee the most entrenched, unnecessarily expensive services the average person actually needs, including all of the poor people leftists are constantly telling us they want to help, will remain prohibitively expensive to access for anyone other than the millionaires leftists are constantly telling us they hate.

This is important. The most charitable reading of ardent leftists on these issues has ever been they genuinely believe the average person would be better off under a more socialist form of government. As the socialist left now coalesces against a powerful technology specifically because it is making life more affordable for the average person, they prove their altruistic motive is, unambiguously, a lie. They only care about power.

Much like California’s wealth tax, artificial intelligence is an interesting battleground for power on the left, which has divided on the issue. Gavin Newsom opposes the wealth tax, officially on grounds it will be a disaster for the economy, but probably his opposition has something to do with all of his billionaire donors. Similarly, the center-left clearly supports a wide variety of ‘good guys’ in AI, while socialists have turned dogmatically against the entire project.

In a more superficial reading, the internecine left-wing conflict maybe reduces to a question of jobs. Unions are worried their members will lose their jobs to the machines, a tale as old as time, and a not entirely idiotic concern. But with so many prominent DNC funders minting fortunes in AI, and with AI now on a trajectory to be a kind of base layer for everything in our country, from our search engines and our social media platforms to our military, the politics of the average AI lab are currently poised to matter for the rest of our lives. And those politics tend, decisively, to the center, institutional left. That is not just a threat to Republicans, but to the socialists currently cannibalizing the DNC.

Much as a theory of mind, or the ability of a human to imagine the thoughts of another human, has been key to the survival of our human race, there is no competing in this world against a dedicated group of people with a real theory of power: that is, an instinct to look at the world through the lens, almost exclusively, of power, to pursue power, and to defend the power of both oneself and one’s allies, as intuited almost subconsciously along tribalistic lines. You’re playing checkers (what ideas would make the world a better place?), they’re playing chess (oops, we flooded the entire judicial branch of government with militant communists, and they just ruled that your existence is illegal). To lack a theory of power in a country where so many operate exclusively behind the frame is to exist, almost constantly, in a state of confusion.

Why is the party of women’s rights insisting violent men must, if they so request, be permitted access to a woman’s prison cell? Why is the party of the Enlightenment mainlining Islamic fundamentalism into the country? Why did an illegal immigrant from Venezuela have a sacred right to a Miami condo just a couple months ago on grounds his dictator “president” was a homicidal maniac, but arresting that maniac is, today, a moral outrage?

The answer to all of these questions is really no more complicated than, at each moment, these issues served left-wing power. Yet we sit around wondering “why are these people so crazy?” They’re not crazy. You’re just blind.

It is in this state of confusion where you will meet a wealth tax officially designed to help the poor, which can in practice — so clearly — only exacerbate the state’s endemic funding crisis, you will suggest counter proposals that would actually help the crisis, and you will be destroyed. Because your destruction was never the cost of the policy, but the purpose. And neither you, nor this country, will be safe until you understand this. But simply understanding is also not enough. You have to survive (and thriving would be nice as well). In this, fortunately, there is a road map.

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