Imagine socialist Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders in a political debate saying: “Black people should not exist. I propose that we impose a confiscatory 97.5 percent tax rate on them to make their survival impossible.”
We would be outraged at any politician who made such a racist and hate-filled statement. Sen. Sanders has never said any such bigoted thing about African Americans.
But earlier this year, newly minted millionaire Sanders declared that “billionaires should not exist,” and proposed imposing a discriminatory tax of 97.5 percent on them so that such rich people would quickly cease to exist.
You might think that people choose to become wealthy, but that you and I do not pick our race. What we call race is vaguely defined by a set of factors such as skin color imposed on us by genetics, our inborn DNA over which we have no choice or control. It is unjust and racist to hate and punish us for what our genes created.
But recent research at Kings College London and Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, finds that 37 to 48 percent of the tendency to be an entrepreneur is genetic. “The tendency to identify new business opportunities,” reported Inc. Magazine about this scientific research, “is in your genes.”
“Being rich and successful IS in your DNA,” wrote the U.K. Daily Mail in July 2018, reporting new scientific findings at Duke University School of Medicine in North Carolina that “Being dealt the right genes determines whether you [are] … upwardly socially mobile.”
Business success, I once argued in the Wall Street Journal, is at least partly based on genetics. “Have you noticed,” I wrote, “that wealth tends to run in families?”
In that column I also proposed adding to the list of forbidden topics that made a crime into a hate crime a new item – hate based on class. Bernie Sanders and all the other Democratic presidential candidates who scheme to destroy billionaires via a “wealth tax” merely for being rich should be as guilty of a hate crime as one who attacks people for being black or homosexual or female.
If becoming rich has a genetic component, then Richism – hatred and envy of the rich – is just as immoral and should be just as illegal as racism.
Too bad for the Democrats, socialists and Marxists that their ideology and hence their political power has been built on preaching that we need to “soak,” hate and assault the wealthy.
My proposal to expand hate-crime protection to a person’s “class” is urgent because new polling by the Cato Institute finds that the belief that “it is acceptable in some situations to be violent toward the wealthy” is growing. The Cato polling finds this attack-the-rich view in 35 percent of those under 30, 36 percent of those identifying themselves as “liberal,” 47 percent of self-identified “socialists” and 17 percent of “Americans in general.”
Most other countries have few rich people, and those rich usually made their money not through entrepreneurship and free markets but via something like crony capitalism – enriching themselves through government influence.
Think of Hunter Biden raking in $50,000 per month in Ukraine from a gas company only because he has a politically connected father.
Hunter’s company also reportedly raked in $1.5 billion from a company run by Communist China’s People’s Liberation Army, after flying into China with his dad at taxpayer expense aboard Air Force Two and arranging a meeting between Joe Biden and the head of this company.
Hunter says he is quitting his company title, but analysts discovered that he is keeping his rich privileged crony status as co-owner. Decent people are right to despise this kind of obvious political corruption and greed. Joe Biden is morally unfit to hold any office of public trust in America.
“American exceptionalism” exists because for centuries those with a craving for freedom and opportunity have brought their DNA here. As Craig R. Smith and I documented in “The Inflation Deception,” those self-selected pioneers came here with an exceptional proportion of what UCLA Psychiatrist Peter C. Whybrow surmises is what geneticists call D4-7 dopamine receptor alleles in our DNA.
Americans with this genetic blueprint, we wrote, “carry traits of energy, enthusiasm and ambition that could help explain our nation’s enormous success at business, entrepreneurship and innovation.”
Our DNA helps explain why President Donald Trump loves America, and why the radical left that has hijacked the Democratic Party has a racist hatred for America. The non-crony rich are island havens free from socialist groupthink domination.
Lowell Ponte is a former Reader’s Digest Roving Editor. His articles have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and other major publications. His latest paper co-authored with Craig R. Smith, “Protecting Your Wealth in Today’s America: How You Invest Your Savings Requires New Thinking,” shows how to rethink several areas of investment to protect and grow your savings in our new schizophrenic politics. For a free, postpaid copy, call toll-free 800-630-1492.
