When you criticize modern American capitalism, you can expect the standard retorts. You're a commie or a socialist, or you're naive and don't understand the real world. Nothing happens unless somebody makes money off it. Anything else is un-American, because America is about free market opportunity.

This is especially true when it comes to tax-the-rich schemes, which are seen as as a naive disincentive to earning wealth, and everyone from economists and business leaders to Joe Six Pack Republicans will call it a bad idea, a misguided philosophy that goes counter to free markets.

The problem is the free market philosophy so many agree with has very little to do with the facts as they stand.

In our free-market country, we can't take a British Airways flight from Indianapolis to Kansas City and shoes cost more than they should because we're using a tariff to protect a domestic industry that's long since died out. We use tariffs and quotas to restrict free trade by protecting everything from dairy, sugar and peanut producers to manufacturers of alcohol, cigarettes or steel.

So let's get the you-naive-commie argument going here right now. I am not here to propose a Robin Hood soak-the-rich and give the allegedly undeserving poor. I'm here to propose an outrageously high tax rate on the super rich, say a 90-95-99 percent tax on all income earned above $100 million dollars.

Now, the argument goes, if we did that, nobody would ever want to make that kind of money again, there would be no incentive for them.

And that's exactly right. That's precisely the point.

It may sound like economic policy, but we're actually going after something else.

Crime.

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Aha, say the critics -- you think it's a crime for people to be rich. And I say absolutely not.

What I'm saying, first of all, is that most of the money being made in these amounts is being made in a way that does not serve the public interest -- despite the high-fallutin nonsense from economists and pundits about well-lubricated financial markets. Those well-lubricated markets dried up in a credit crunch and the only thing those good-sounding economic theories provided was cover for billions of dollars going into a handful of pockets. Continue > >