They did build that

Photo by Bridger Bowcutt on Unsplash

I remember Barack Obama telling business owners that they didn’t build what they had. “You didn’t build that” became something of a rallying cry, blunt evidence that the Democratic Party had no interest in recognizing the role hard work plays in success.

Instead, they want to take credit for your success, blame you for your failures, and reap the benefits of your labor.

No matter what you do or how hard you work, your efforts and successes aren’t your own. Those belong to Democrats.

California, for example, is putting a tax into place that intends to hit billionaires hard. Very hard. They already try to punish people for leaving the state, but now they want to hurt the wealthiest for staying.

And this kind of thinking from a trust-fund baby turned “journalist” is the epitome of that mentality.

Here's what Swisher said, emphasis added:

“And I think what it is, it specifically targets again, 100 people, I think it is, who are threatening to leave California,” Swisher says. “I am of two minds of this. One is, you made...all your money in California, you ungrateful piece of s***, you could figure out a way to pay more taxes, and we deserve the taxes from you, given you made your wealth here. The second is, yes, there are different ways to do this but the length of time it would take and the kind if vehemence you would fight whatever happens, means nothing would happen, so why don’t we just do shock and awe at this point, because you don’t seem to be availing yourself to thinking that you owe your state something more.“

They didn’t make all their money in California. These are national and international businesses that provide in-demand goods and services. That’s how many of them made their money.

Bingo.

Very few people become billionaires by just working within a single state, even a very large one by population. And really, why would they bother when there’s an entire nation they can do business with?

They didn’t make their money off of California. They just made it while living there. That doesn’t make California somehow worthy of the fruits of their labor. It’s like a landlord deciding he’s entitled to half the money you made working from home because it’s his property you used.

Most of those billionaires have endured extensive taxes for years, and they’ve shrugged them off as the cost of living in the state. They don’t like them, but they pay them. They’ve dealt with inane regulations and being demonized by the ruling elite there.

Now, though, they’re being targeted directly simply because they were successful, and to such a degree that it would be backdated to January 1st of this year, even though it hasn’t landed on a ballot yet.

So, they left. If you’re going to tell me that you want five percent of my total assets simply because I succeeded, then I’m going to move, too, if I’m able.

Sure, I’m not remotely in any position to have to worry about this myself, but I don’t imagine I’d like it any better if I had billions.

For perspective, a five percent tax is about $5,000,000 per billion, and since most of these guys are multibillionaires, it’s going to cost more than that per person. (Edit: Originally, I screwed up the basic math and said it was just $50K. That’s been corrected.)

Plus, this isn’t the totality of their taxes. They’ll still be on the hook for all other forms of taxation.

While it might not seem to be a whole lot to some people in the grand scheme of things, if you’re super rich, the truth is that the proposal was enough to warrant folks leaving, and for Swisher, who admits that she inherited her wealth, to pretend that these success stories somehow owe it to California to just take it on the chin is more than a little rich.

(Edit: The italics above were added because of my stupid math error. I’ll also note that I’d freaking leave over $50 million, too.

“But it’s just a one-time tax,” someone might argue, to which I just laugh.

It’s not a one-time tax. It’s a one-time tax in this bill, but if this flies through, it’ll be far from a one-time tax.

Plus, let’s be real, the current income tax started as a tax on just the richest Americans, the proverbial one percent. Within a generation, it was a tax on income for pretty much everyone.

Only a fool would believe that this will really be just one time, and then California will just move on with its existence. Oh no, not the slightest. They’ll do it again and again, and because so few individuals will be impacted, it’s an easy sell to the voters. Look at what Swisher herself said:

“And I think what it is, it specifically targets again, 100 people, I think it is, who are threatening to leave California”

Because it’s a relatively small number, does that make it better? Or is it that because it’s a relatively small number, it will pass through the voters of California?

After all, it’s not them.

Yet, over time, there will be mission creep. The next time, it’ll be a lower threshold and include more people. Then, in time, it’ll be just a blanket tax on anyone who holds assets, including homeowners, small business owners, and the like.

You know, the middle class.

These billionaires who have evacuated the state are smart. They left while they could because they didn’t want to risk being hammered with a retroactive tax. I’d leave, too.

But the idea that people who make something of themselves inherently owe it to the state they live in, so much so that they should give up a sizeable portion of their total assets, isn’t remotely encouraging to those trying to make something of themselves.

In the Ayn Rand book Atlas Shrugged, the main character Dagny Taggart finds herself in Galt’s Gulch, where she encounters various captains of industry she knew well and had disappeared.

There, she encounters a man she didn’t know. She finds out that he was a truck driver, not some powerful CEO. However, the man notes that he didn’t want to remain a truck driver. He had ambition and wanted to be free to succeed or fail due to his own efforts.

That bit always stuck out to me, because I’m like that in many ways. I’m a hard worker who tries desperately to build something for my family, so my kids will have options when I’m gone that I never had. I want to know that, should the worst happen to me, my wife will be fine, and I want to make my mark on the world.

I’m that truck driver, really, and while I’m not an industrialist billionaire, I hate the idea of being punished for success, even if only because I hope to achieve that myself someday.

People like Swisher are just the same kind of people that Rand warned us of. They’re the people who I thought cartoonish when I first read the book, only to see how very real they are.

They think they’re entitled to their property and yours.

You didn’t build it. They built it, at least in their minds, and you should pay tribute to them for allowing you to take advantage of it. It doesn’t matter what the price of tribute is; you should gladly pay it because they simply expect you to.

Screw. That.

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