Even by the standards of plutocratic dead-thought exercises, Jeff Bezos’s Wednesday sit-down with CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin was mortifying. The billionaire founder of Amazon conceded there are a lot of problems, then declared they could be solved by eliminating taxes and getting government and unions out of the way. Taxing Manhattan pied-à-terres “doesn’t solve anything,” he lied. “We already have the most progressive tax system in the world,” he lied again. “You could double the taxes I pay, it’s not going to help that teacher in Queens,” he added, also lying. Evidently the man who owns the world’s biggest library has yet to check anything out. But to his credit, Bezos did pick the correct venue to claim Donald Trump is “more mature ” and a “more disciplined version of himself” without yielding a spit take by his host. It’s not Andrew Ross Sorkin’s job to challenge the ultra-wealthy ; doing so jeopardizes his market value of appearing to speak for them. His job is suggesting a shiver when they gravely intone, not pinning down what screwheaded metric Bezos leans on to claim American taxation is the most progressive in the world. He won’t point out the truth that, actually, taxing rich-guy apartments in New York does solve the problem, because it gives the City of New York more money to do things. Or that doubling the tax rates of the ultra-wealthy will benefit everybody else along the chain. He will never satisfy normal-income viewers by asking Bezos why doubling his effective rate to almost 2% presents a hardship.
That raising tax money allows the government to actually do things is not a radical contention. And it’s telling that Bezos has become comfortable refusing to concede even this much. It’s not worth it for him to feel like he owes you anything anymore. Lip service is too expensive. He’s already at the end of his rope, and while he may like the idea of a social contract, the facts are the facts. It would be a futile gesture anyway. It’s not worth it for him to feel like he owes you anything anymore. Bezos’s dismissal of economic populism as a form of dangerous scapegoating is the enduring grace note of dead-thought billionaire apologetics. Sixteen years ago, it was Blackstone’s Stephen Schwarzmann who compared the removal of the carried-interest tax exemption to the day the Nazis rolled into Poland. A few years later, b illionaire venture capitalist Tom Perkins likened Occupy Wall Street to Kristallnacht. Home Depot’s Ken Langone knew what was up when Bezos’s bête noire Sen. Elizabeth Warren proposed a tax on incomes over $50 million: Here was Hitler becoming the German chancellor all over again. Nobody ask them for analogies to the 77 percent-and-up top marginal tax rates of the 1950s and ’60s that led to the largest expansion of the middle class in history, because it’s probably the Holocaust. The new ultra-rich are always misunderstanding yesterday to build tomorrow by stopping everything today, and they’re continually breaking new ground in that field. After decades of toil, billionaires have become not just the Jews but also Black people. “Tax the rich,” per Steve Roth, CEO of New York’s largest commercial landlord, is as hateful an expression as something like the n-word, or Palestinian freedom . They are 18 months from tumblr-teening themselves into claiming that criticizing billionaires is #toxic #reverse-ableism.
The zombie take lying at the heart of Bezos’s dark forebodings is the same one that has been lumbering around since von Hayek published a condensed version of “Road to Serfdom” in the April 1945 edition of Readers Digest: That every thwarted wealth tax proposal is just a few votes shy of a Shoah, because the Nazis were the real leftists all along . Now, you could point out that the Nazis violently criminalized trade unions and eliminated labor as an independent part of the economy, barred women from most employment, barred Jews from most of the economy after seizing their businesses and assets, murdered and exiled party proponents of economic populism, partnered with the wealthiest industrialists in the nation, put a conservative banker in charge of the economy, then privatized a breathtaking amount of it. But none of that eliminates the presence of the word “socialist” in the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, and if it’s in the name, it must be true. The new ultra-rich are always misunderstanding yesterday to build tomorrow. In reality, as John Ganz notes , the Nazi economy was less socialized than Konrad Adenauer’s West Germany. Its most significant interventions came in the form of defrauding the party faithful and losing gobsmacking amounts of money via graft and creating supplemental material for killing millions of people. The rest of the economy, per Richard Evans and most modern scholarship on the Third Reich, functioned as an interplay among business interests and corrupt local, regional and national officials jawboning various things into and out of the economy (not least of which was slave labor), either to get their beaks wet, to politically outflank each other on special projects of value to leaders further up the chain, or both. If historical accounts of the venality and opportunism of the public-private partners in the Reich economy remind you of anyone who had a $40 million Venetian Great Gatsby wedding last year, rest assured, it reminds them, too. That’s the other reason it’s so urgent to project the slippery slope onto you. The need to displace blame for the next Reich rises in proportion to how much you’re cooperating with it, unavoidably dependent on it or actively building it. That, after all, is why the world’s richest man spends his time online trying to propagandize a Woke Genocide into existence when he’s not tweeting antisemitic theories, praising eugenics, uncorking sieg heils or cutting funding to Africa to the tune of 10 million projected deaths. And it’s why someone running an illegal monopoly choked with shoddy merchandise and a private space company seeking more billions in federal funding needs to go on TV, toe the party line and praise the Hitler-admiring president he despises through a swollen and immobilized permanent poker face.
Last Thursday, Trump proposed the launch of a $1.776 billion slush fund for Jan. 6 rioters. If their pardons were a reward for the first putsch, the slush fund can be seen as an inciting down-payment on a second. As honors go, it’s noble enough for a country where our fondness for structured settlements is being overtaken by our need for cash now. It is also a less overt gesture — in keeping with the president’’s winking fondness for wiseguy implication and payoffs — than the Nazis’ decision to confer medals on those who marched with Hitler during his failed Beer Hall Putsch of 1923. For years, the putschists were commemorated in a formal anniversary, the sort of thing where, were it held today, you might buy some cheap red, white and black bunting off Amazon to string around the office. At the risk of de-centering billionaires’ anxious experience, that’s what they were celebrating on Kristallnacht.
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