Luxury Beliefs
How to grapple with populism and wealth
A few days ago, a woman with the account @HeyBooBoo16 tweeted how she and her husband were forced to sell their rental property. The reason? The federal moratorium on evictions allowed her tenants to live rent-free on her property for over a year, and it ultimately cost her the house she inherited from her father-in-law.
It’s always sad to hear stories about Americans forced into precarious financial situations, and it’s particularly poignant when someone is forced to relinquish their family inheritance to make ends meet. Nevertheless, her tweet provoked gross responses.
Socialists celebrated the idea that someone with two homes had lost one, describing the landlord as a “leech.” They cried their typical, political catchphrases like “housing should be a human right” and unsurprisingly condemned capitalism.
Those cruel responses are part and parcel of behavior enabled by the internet (the tendency to celebrate the misfortune of others en masse). I don’t have much hope in the idea of socialists showing compassion to others online, either. However, what caught my eye was the number of people on my side of the political aisle, trad-populists and national populists, who also celebrated her misfortune.
It demonstrated an inability to understand the difference between money and institutional wealth.
National populists should not be against the upper-middle-class or the lower-upper class. National populism is not a movement against people with money. As a society, we need people with money, and sometimes lots of money. Who else do you think funds classical art programs, medical technology research, and religious organizations? People with money.
Whether they inherited or worked for their money, members of the upper-middle-class are not the enemy of the working class. Oftentimes, they’re the ones who keep them employed and invest in local projects to make communities better. They’re the ones who can afford to eat organic food grown by small family farms and pay a higher price at local small businesses. In many ways, they keep some of the best parts of the economy running. Rich people are not the enemy.
National populists are not at war with anyone person in particular. We are at war with institutions and those with institutional wealth. That is the difference.
We should tax the shit out of extremely wealthy members of society, like Wall Street bankers and Big Tech oligarchs. And there should be more tax brackets within the tax code to properly target them. Individuals who make $500,000 a year are not remotely in the same boat as someone who makes $50 million a year. Those with institutional wealth almost entirely live on the coasts and work in entertainment, tech, or Wall Street. All the while, they work day and night to push cultural Marxism and fund the campaigns of socialists for higher office.
One day, we need a President with the will to break up the quasi-monopolies that run huge segments of our country. We shouldn’t be okay with Walmart or Dollar Generals running mom-and-pop shops out of business or other large corporations shipping jobs overseas. We should appropriately respond to their malfeasance by using the power of the state to push back. We should also demand that state governments stop investing their pensions with woke investment firms who push critical race theory “training.”
That’s how you protect small businesses and the working class, by punishing the institutions that gobble up significant portions of the market and push down wages by importing foreign labor and shipping jobs overseas. You don’t attack someone who lost $42,000 a year in passive income.
To any of my followers who are frustrated that housing prices have gone up too much, you’re right. But the answer is not punishing people with a few extra rental homes. In fact, rental homes are important for people who are young, students, transient, or going through some major life change.
Two important policies can and should be enacted to reduce property costs. First, end mass immigration, which would make homes widely available for native-born Americans. Second, stop allowing foreign companies to buy large amounts of property. Those two things alone would reduce the cost of housing, and you won’t have to punish anyone who is on your side.