A couple of days ago I heard a clip from a Larry Kudlow interview in which he said that the reason the economy is so bad under the Biden/Harris administration is because “the left hates businesses.” This is completely backward. It’s another example of conservatives buying into, instead of rejecting, the institutional left’s opposite-talk, their lying with fake terms and fake outrage. The left doesn’t hate businesses. The left hates you and me.

The left is fully aware that their regulations cause businesses to raise prices, and the left is fully aware that it is you and I who pay those prices. They hate us, and they love that they can use left-friendly monopolies to screw us over.

In general, the Left loves businesses, if those businesses are run in a manner easily coopted by government. They love businesses that are run as conglomerate-by-committee. They love businesses that are run by fellow members of the beltway crowd. They especially love businesses that are run like the left runs government, although these tend to fail spectacularly the more they emulate the left.

They loved Twitter, when it was run by committee. They hated it when Elon Musk took over. The businesses they hate are businesses run by individuals. Because they don’t hate businesses. They hate people.

Everything they do that the right claims is “bad for business” isn’t bad for big businesses. It’s bad for individuals running a business—and it’s bad for individuals who no longer have the choice of buying from a local, responsive business.

It’s great for well-connected national and global businesses run by disconnected beltway billionaires and bureaucracies. It kills their local competition. It monopolizes their customers. Amazon is not going to starve from Biden’s or Harris’s “anti-business” policies. If Disney dies it won’t be because of government policies but because they act like the left. And none of the board members will suffer from its death. Only Disney fans and retirees invested in Disney, often involuntarily via big, monopolizing investment firms run by the left’s beltway billionaires.

This is the regressivism of the left: to return to a time when only the rich could afford to be businessmen. When only the rich could afford to be investors.

You can see it in Vice President Kamala Harris’s plan to institute price controls. That kind of top-down system requires big businesses with no competition. The price-tagger-in-chief can make her pronouncements to the business leaders she shares the cocktail circuit with. It won’t work with, and destroys, small business owners without such access, that is, local manufacturers, local restauranteurs, local grocers.

This is oddly specific…

It’s like the left’s claim that they will only raise taxes on “the rich” or on “corporations”. It’s bullshit and they know it. They claim to love the old 98% tax rate. And they do. But not because it taxed the rich. The rich never pay the left’s high taxes and never did. The rich can afford lawyers to find loopholes. National and multinational corporations already have lawyers on salary.

They don’t even need to spend more money to find loopholes. They know the politicians necessary to call in special favors and create loopholes, such as the so-called Panera exemption from California’s minimum wage law.

The only people who ever paid and who ever will pay the left’s high rates were and are people who can’t afford lawyers, don’t have special access, and didn’t know they had blundered into the left’s definition of rich by selling their house at the wrong time or by inheriting their parents’ farm or small business or by not performing the correct pigeon-dance of asset and debit shuffling to avoid taxable income.

At best, the left’s real plan when they talk about taxing the rich and big business is to do what they did with the alternate minimum tax: set it high, and then wait to reap the benefits when inflation pushes the tax “on the rich” down to everyone who can’t afford tax lawyers.

At worst, the left’s taxes hit the middle class and local business owners right out of the box.

This is the regressivism of the left: to return to a time when only the rich could afford to pay low taxes.

Despite all the talk about raising taxes on the rich and big business, the left always ends up raising taxes on the middle class and the working class, on the local entrepreneur, or the home “business” owner who is so small they don’t even know they’re running a business. The left knows that’s where the money is. It wasn’t Kamala Harris, after all, who first proposed not taxing tips. That was Donald Trump. It probably never even occurred to Harris to suggest reducing taxes on the non-rich, and if she wins the election in November it will revert back to not occurring to her. I’d love to see congress pass a one-page No-Taxes-On-Tips bill right now and send it to the White House just to force her hand. And just maybe get this bill passed now when she can’t afford to kill it.

Most of what the left does is about privileging the rich and the connected. When commercial air travel is banned or taxed out of existence, the rich will still be able to go by private jet. When vision zero cuts off cities except for rail and special traffic, the rich will still be able to go by limousine. Even now, a limousine is, by definition, a multi-person vehicle for HOV lanes—in some jurisdictions, even when there’s only one person in it.

This is the regressivism of the left: to return to a time when only the nobility could afford travel.

The left defines themselves out of government-controlled health care, they build walls around their houses and communities even while fighting against walls to provide sanctuary for the rest of us. They defund the police but never defund their security details.

They make it harder for kids of the middle class to find entry-level jobs and gain experience, knowing that college-level internships remain available for their own children.

This is the regressivism of the left: a society where only the children of the nobility can choose their career.

They deny school choice to people who cannot afford to pay three times for education—taxes, tuition, and transportation and other opportunity costs. But private schools will always thrive among the rich and connected.

This is the institutional left’s regressivism. Theirs is not a progressive society. It’s extraordinarily regressive. Their ideal society is a stratified feudalism—a two-tier, three-tier, four-tier system, with them at the top.