Billionaires, Control Your Greed!

 Stumping for Proposition 40, the proposed 5% billionaire wealth tax in California recently, Bernie Sanders screamed, "Billionaires, control your greed! For these people enough is never enough. They are dedicated to accumulating more and more wealth and power and they do that no matter what harm they bring to working families...The billionaire class cannot have it all. This nation belongs to all of us.”

Of course, Sanders is a multimillionaire, but he isn't evil. Only billionaires are evil. But are they? Why does Sanders think they are evil? According to Sanders and most socialists, billionaires stole their wealth from the rest of us. They subscribe to the medieval economics that says one can grow wealthy only at the expense of others. 

That was true for most of history. Until the advent of capitalism in the 17th century Dutch Republic, the "honorable" ways to gain wealth were through plunder in war, kidnapping for ransom and bribery as a government official. Capitalism criminalized those methods of gaining wealth. Since then, the wealthy have earned it through commerce, starting and growing a business. They have created new wealth instead of taking the wealth of others. 

Sanders called out Mark Zuckerberg founder of Facebook, Google co-founder Sergey Brin, and Oracle creator Larry Ellison. If any of these men have robbed anyone, Sanders should take his evidence to the police. He can't because he has no evidence. They haven't robbed anyone. Sanders merely assumes they are criminals because of his socialist nonsense and his medieval economics. Envy plays a role, too, because Sanders is worth only tens of millions of dollars. So he resents anyone more successful than himself.  Instead of providing evidence that those men are thieves, Sanders stirs up a lynch mob by inflaming its envy. 

From a Biblical perspective, what is wrong with adding a tax on billionaires of 5%? Certainly, they can afford it. But such a tax, and progressive taxation in general, is immoral. Throughout the 19th century, socialists proposed progressive taxation, taxing the wealthy a higher rates than the rest, and voters rejected it as immoral because most voters followed the Biblical principle of government we call capitalism. 

The theologians who distilled the principles of capitalism during the Reformation insisted on equality before the law of all  citizens because, according to Romans 13, government authorities are ministers of God. Often, the Greek word for ministers is translated as deacons. So they must treat citizens as God does, with no favoritism.  And God instructed judges, the only government authorities in the Torah, “You shall do no injustice in court. You shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great, but in righteousness shall you judge your neighbor." In other words, treat the rich and poor the same in matters of the civil law. 

Until the decline of Christianity in the 20th century, most voters understood Biblical principles of government. A flat tax rate is the only moral and Biblical tax rate. But modernist "Christians" such as Walter Rauschenbusch, founder in the US of the social gospel movement, denied the deity of Christ and saw Marx as savior in place of Christ. He and his unbelieving socialist friends elevated envy to a virtue. So, in the early 20th century, voters felt righteous in expressiong their envy through progressive taxation. 

Prop 40 is no only a bad fiscal move for California, it' clearly immoral.