Scary Sentence of the Day...

In a piece by Alex Hern, writing in the New Statesman:

Now, redistribution is already, prima facie, one of the absolute best things a government can do.

The term “redistribution”, here, means “take money from some people, and give it to others”. 

That sentence is not being taken out of context – go read the article if you doubt me.

This is a very baldly stated version of a central tenet of Progressivism (and many other flavors of socialism): that the state should take money from some people, and give that money to others.

It's bad enough to know that a significant fraction of our body politic believes that stealing from the wealthy and handing that money over to the less wealthy is a justifiable – and even good – thing to do.  Note that this “redistribution” really isn't from the rich to the poor, as many Progressives would style it.  Not unless you consider people making $75k a year to be rich, and anyone making less than $40k a year to be poor – because, roughly speaking, that's how our current redistribution system (primarily income taxes and earned income tax credits) is set up.  But to call such as system one of the “absolute best” things that government can do...now that's scary.

Reading things like that causes me to hear those drums again.  Those drums of doom...