The Ten Days That Shook California

The defeat of the proposed wealth tax in California takes me back to the “Ten Days That Shook the World.” The phrase is the title of a report from the Bolshevik revolution by journalist John Reed. The book is a classic of foreign corresponding. Reed himself is long gone now, felled by a fever and buried in the Kremlin wall. Before he died, though, he witnessed how the Revolution’s limits on private property quickly expanded to restrictions on civil liberties. First, though, the news this week from California, where a proposal to tax the wealth of the ultra rich went down to defeat in one of our most liberal states. It took California a while to count the vote. It may be that the modern Marxists may have had difficulty imagining defeat. With 83 percent of the votes in, though, the Associated Press projects that Proposition 40, as the wealth tax was dubbed, has failed with only some 47 percent in support.The Times reckons that the margin was narrowing as the votes were tallied, but not narrowing fast enough to overtake the opposition to the measure. The plan would have, the Gray Lady notes, “created the nation’s first wealth tax by targeting the assets of residents with a net worth beyond $1 billion.” The wealth tax, if approved, would have exacted a one-time levy of 5 percent on the net worth of California’s billionaires.That’s a staggering stack of spondulix even for a billionaire. Prop 40 was backed by California’s Democratic Party but opposed by its Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom. Mr. Newsom wants to run for president and, apparently, reckons that beyond California there’s even less support for a wealth tax. California’s wealth tax failed even though revenues from the tax would, supposedly, have gone to health care, “food assistance,” and education spending.The AP notes that California’s proposed wealth tax “was the nation’s biggest test yet of an idea progressives have long championed: raising taxes on the ultra-rich by targeting the main way they make their money — through their investments as opposed to the paychecks they receive from work.” The idea of taxing wealth predates even, say, the revolution in Russia.It would be inaccurate to make too much of that, but the ideas being mooted these days from New York, in the form of a pied-à-terre tax, to California have a Marxist streak, and it’s hard to put on them a positive spin. Not that the Times isn’t trying. It lays the defeat of Prop 40 to the fact that the proposition “suffered from having a weak coalition of supporters” who were unable to compete with ads and was stuck with social media and influencers. In contrast, the Google co-founder Sergey Brin alone gave, per the Times, “more than $100 million toward defeating the wealth tax.” The Times quotes the head of a health care employees union, David Regan, as saying that the billionaire-funded attacks produced “a lot of confusion and a lot of second-guessing among people who really in their hearts know what the right thing to do is.” Mr. Regan vowed to pursue another billionaire tax in 2028.Which brings me back to the “Ten Days That Shook the World.” On the first day of the Revolution, the comrades suspended civil liberties in Russia. That was supposedly temporary. On the 10th day, a proposal was made to end the suspension of press freedom. That triggered from the comrades a somewhat hilarious round of speeches supporting to one degree or another loosening the restrictions that 10 days prior had been laid on the press.Then, Reed wrote, came Lenin — “calm, unemotional, his forehead wrinkled, as he spoke slowly, choosing his words; each sentence falling like a hammer-blow.” Lenin declared that the civil war was not yet finished, “the enemy is still with us,” and so “we shall not permit them, under the pretense of freedom of the Socialist press, to obtain, through the secret support of the bourgeoisie, a monopoly of printing-presses, ink and paper….“These essentials must become the property of the Soviet Government,” Lenin rasped. The story illuminates how economic and civil liberty are warp and woof in the same fabric of freedom. The destruction of the free press in Russia was done, like California’s wealth tax would have been, via a temporary seizure of private property. It’s a point that California seems to have grasped, while New York is nursing its own wealth tax on pieds-à-terre.

The Ten Days That Shook California

The Ten Days That Shook California

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