Recently I posted a short pointing out a curious phenomenon. That is, the ultra-rich have nothing in common with you, they live lives you cannot imagine, they shape laws you never voted on, and yet ordinary people will sprint out of the woodwork to defend them the moment anyone suggests a tax on extreme wealth.

The comments arrived within minutes, as if to prove the thesis for me.

One told me the rich “butter our bread.” Another explained that if we tax them, “everything goes up in price cuz they can do that to you.” A third laid out the whole doctrine in three sentences: “the rich have the money to leave after the tax laws take effect, the poor get left holding the burden, and THAT IS WHY WE SAY NO TO TAXES”. He closed by calling me a retard, which seems to be customary in this type of comment.

Here is what struck me, and what this essay is actually about. These are, by their own description, freedom people. Their profiles are wall-to-wall flags and eagles. They will tell you, loudly and often, that they love liberty more than life, that nobody tells them what to do, that the United States is the freest country on Earth and don’t you forget it.

And then, they say: don’t tax the rich, or they will punish us. Don’t anger them. They can raise prices at will. They can take away our jobs. They can abandon us whenever they choose, and we will be left in the wreckage. Our lives exist at their pleasure, so whatever you do, don’t make them mad.

In case you didn’t notice, that’s not exactly a description of freedom. That’s a description of a deferential servant and a capricious master.

So what gives? Why do they seem so confused about freedom? Well, we might be talking about different things, because there are two ways to define liberty, and the devil is in the details.

The low friction version says you are free as long as nobody is currently interfering with you. If you’re living how you want without resistance, you’re free, end of story.

The older version, the one the American founders actually used, says something stronger: you are unfree if anyone holds arbitrary power over you, whether or not they ever use it. A slave with a kind master who never raises the whip is still a slave. What makes you unfree is not the interference. It is the mastery, the fact that someone else can punish you at will and you live arranged around not provoking them. This is why the colonists, who were mostly left alone by London, still called themselves slaves of the Crown. They were naming the relationship, not complaining about daily interference. 

By that older standard, the standard the flag-and-eagle crowd claims as their inheritance, “don’t make the rich mad” is not a defense of liberty. It is a confession of servitude, and an unusually detailed one. It names the master, lists his powers, describes the punishments, and counsels obedience. The people shouting freedom the loudest are the ones describing, in their own words, exactly who owns them.

When the message is “nice economy you’ve got here, shame if the job creators got upset,” that is a protection racket. The defenders of the wealthy have correctly identified the extortion. They have simply chosen to side with the extortionist, and to call the rest of us fools for suggesting the neighborhood stop paying.

The defenses of the arrangement always come in the same four forms. I have now heard each of them hundreds of times, and unlike the slurs, they at least try to be arguments.

1: Prices will go up. As one commenter phrased it, “cuz they can do that to you.” That is a confession of pricing power. If they can raise prices at will the moment anything touches them, then the market is not competitive and the game is exactly as rigged as I said it was. He defended them with the evidence against them.

But the claim also fails on its own terms. A wealth tax falls on a person’s fortune, not on a company’s books. Taxing a billionaire’s stock holdings does not add one cent to the cost of making, shipping, or selling anything. Prices are set by what customers will pay. If a company could profitably charge more, it already would be, tax or no tax. The threat to raise prices in retaliation is not economics. It is exactly what it sounds like.

2: They create the jobs. This is the bread-buttering argument, gratitude dressed up as economics. But jobs are not gifts. A job is a trade, labor for wages, and nobody hires out of kindness or spare cash. Businesses hire when customers show up and not one minute before. Customers create jobs. Demand creates jobs. Working people spending their paychecks create jobs.

In the decades after WWII, when the top marginal tax rate sat between 70 and 91 percent, this country built the strongest middle class in history and jobs grew faster than at almost any time since. Then we spent forty years cutting taxes at the top on the promise that the money would become jobs, and it became stock buybacks and fourth homes instead. If concentrated wealth created jobs, we would be drowning in them by now. We’re not. Draw your own conclusion.

3: They’ll just leave. Wealth taxes are proposed at the federal level, and there the argument runs into a fact almost nobody in my comment section seems to know: the United States is nearly the only country on Earth that taxes its citizens on their worldwide income no matter where they live. A US billionaire who moves to Monaco still owes the IRS every April. The only true escape is renouncing citizenship, and Congress closed that door too, with an exit tax that treats renunciation as if you sold everything you own on the way out. “They’ll just leave” is France’s problem. It is the one dodge American law already sealed.

And even where they can leave, they mostly don’t. A sociologist named Cristobal Young studied the tax returns of every millionaire in America over more than a decade: about 2.4 percent move across state lines in a given year, a lower rate than the general population, and when they do move, taxes are rarely the reason. Their businesses, networks, status, and power are rooted in a particular place. The wealthy got rich capturing the wealth of this country. You can’t pack an office tower into a suitcase. The building stays, and the claim on it can be taxed where it stands.

4: They earned it, you’re just jealous, taking their money to give to other people is wrong. The first three are threats. This one skips the argument and goes straight to a verdict on character: You’re envious, you want to take other people’s money, you just want to punish success, the government and the people that benefit are not deserving of it. Envy is doing the work an argument couldn’t. It converts a policy question into a personality flaw, so we can talk about my soul instead of the tax code.

But noticing that someone has power over you is not envy. Noticing that the arrangement picks your pocket is not jealousy. It’s arithmetic. And the arithmetic here is genuinely hilarious: the people typing “you’re just jealous” are, almost to a person, taxed harder than the billionaires they’re defending. In 2018, for the first time on record, the 400 richest families in America paid a lower overall tax rate than the bottom half of the country. When ProPublica got hold of the actual IRS files, the 25 richest Americans came out to a true rate of about 3.4 percent on their wealth growth. Warren Buffett has spent years pointing out that he pays a lower rate than his secretary and publicly wondering why nobody fixes it. Wages get taxed every paycheck, with payroll taxes stacked on top and sales taxes waiting at the register. Fortunes grow untaxed, get borrowed against instead of sold, and pass to heirs with the gains wiped clean. If a tax is a punishment, then the current code punishes work and pardons wealth, and every one of my commenters is standing in the punishment line defending the people in the pardon line.

As for “they earned it”: some of them built real things, granted. But nobody earns a billion dollars with labor. You cannot work ten thousand times harder than a nurse. At that altitude, money comes from owning, not working, from capital gains and monopoly positions and inheritance and lobbying, and it compounds while its owner sleeps. Steinbeck saw the deeper thing decades ago: the poor in America never saw themselves as an exploited class, only as temporarily embarrassed capitalists. The man defending the billionaire’s fortune is not really defending the billionaire. He is defending the story in which his own fortune is still on the way, and any tax on the top is a tax on his imaginary future self. That ticket never gets cashed. But it gets defended like a birthright.

As for the idea that taxing them to fund the government or help other people is wrong, look at the bigger picture. No one accumulates that kind of wealth in a vacuum. The fortune exists inside a lattice of tax-funded structures: courts that enforce the contracts, police that protect the property, corporate and IP law that create the legal entities the wealth lives in, the SEC that makes the shares tradeable, the roads and the educated workforce that made the business possible. You cannot claim the system’s full protection for your wealth and then call the system’s price a robbery. That is demanding the fire department while calling the fire tax theft.

And let’s look at who these “undeserving people” actually are.

The biggest hands held out in America are at the top. Stepped-up basis, carried interest, corporate subsidies, bailouts. The tax breaks and public money flowing upward dwarf anything the imagined lazy neighbor collects.

When a full-time Walmart or fast-food worker qualifies for food stamps, the public money isn’t really going to the worker. It’s flowing through the worker to the employer, subsidizing a payroll the owner refuses to fund. The taxpayer is topping up billionaire labor costs and being told to resent the cashier.

And the actual population of safety-net recipients is overwhelmingly children, the elderly, the disabled, and people who work. The fury gets aimed at the person below collecting two hundred dollars a month in groceries, never at the person above collecting a stepped-up basis worth millions. Right-sized anger, pointed the wrong direction.

Last point, for anyone defending “their” money: tax wealth, not work, doesn’t touch your wages at all. It is the only proposal in the room that takes the burden off the money you actually earned. You’re not defending your paycheck. You’re defending the exemption of people who don’t have one.

But it’s so much easier to be angry at the people on the bottom than the people on the top, isn’t it? It’s safer. After the Second World War, researchers studying how ordinary people come to serve authoritarian systems kept finding one personality pattern, and the Germans had a name for it: the bicyclist’s posture. Bow from the waist up. Kick from the waist down.

Deference flowing upward and cruelty flowing downward are not two separate traits. They are one trait seen from two angles, and I see it every day in the comment section. The same people who plead don’t make the rich mad, who counsel obedience toward the ones with actual power over their lives, show no such gentleness in the other direction. Sideways and down, the gloves are off. The slurs fly at immigrants, at gay people, at the poor, at anyone lower on the ladder, at a guy who posted a fifteen-second video. In thousands of comments across all of my posts, I have not seen one of them punch up. Not once. The posture forbids it. Fear runs up. The boot runs down.

That is what makes the freedom talk so hollow. Freedom, the real kind, the kind the founders meant, is the condition of having no master. It means nobody holds arbitrary power over your livelihood, your prices, your job, your town. The people filling my comments do not have that, and at some level they know it, because they keep telling me exactly who can hurt them and warning me not to bring the punishment down on all of us. What they have instead is a ladder, and a rung on it, and the license to kick downward, and they have been taught to call that liberty.

It isn’t. It is the oldest arrangement in the world with a flag draped over it.

You’ve been taught to fear the tax man more than the man the tax was for.

Tax wealth, not work. Not out of envy, and not to punish anyone. Because a country where a handful of people hold that kind of power over everyone else is not a free country, no matter how many flags line the driveway. And because the surest sign we have stopped being free is that so many of us are so very afraid of making them mad.