Kamala Harris, Perfect Progressive: Trading Lives for Votes

Kamala Harris, a black female, and therefore already twice as qualified to be the Democratic presidential candidate as her nearest rivals, who are merely black or female, has a brilliant plan to improve American education: Reward the most ineffective teachers in the advanced world with a massive pay raise, using money stolen from dead rich people and their rightful (and chosen) heirs, thereby effectively nationalizing a public education system the only merit of which is that it has not yet been fully nationalized.

Billed as “the largest investment in teachers in American history,” the plan would devote $315 billion in federal funding over the next 10 years toward programs that would subsidize pay for public K-12 educators and reward state and local governments for raising them even higher. It would be paid for by as-yet-unspecified changes to the estate tax, which currently applies only to inheritances over $11.4 million for individuals and $22.8 million for married couples.

“As-yet-unspecified changes to the estate tax” means, of course, either a higher rate of taxation or a lower threshold for determining who has to pay it, or more likely both. Progressives like Harris are always eager to point out that “no one needs that much money,” as if practical need defines rights. But wait! For progressives, need does define rights, so on its face, this proposal is just doctrinaire socialism with a healthy dollop of labor union vote-buying on top.

But it takes a truly special progressive politician — or “democratic communist,” as they’ll soon be calling themselves during campaign speeches (knowing that if they don’t, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will put them on her infidel watch list) — to have the audacity to serve up such a Totalitarian Triple Scoop as Harris is offering: socialist redistribution, economic nationalization, and universal spiritual enslavement all in one colorful package.

First, her proposal to pay for this vast new federal “investment” (in union votes) with money stolen from the souls of dead people and their heirs is a direct assault on the principles of self-ownership and private property. The accumulated outcomes of the most materially productive and successful citizens, regardless of what they had hoped they were saving for, will be taken from them and thrown down the toilet of public schooling. Their hopes, in other words, which is to say their practical efforts, while living, to project themselves forward into the future — their dreams of eternity — are reduced by Harris and her ilk to mere kindling for the prairie fire of revolutionary politics.

“What! Are you suggesting that spending on education is a waste?” No, I am suggesting — declaring, actually — that public schooling is not education, and that even if it were, this would not warrant trampling on other human beings lives and intentions.

Second, Harris’ proposal entails a huge advance toward the progressives’ ultimate goal in education, as in all other matters, namely centralized control and the complete uniformity of goals and methods that a nationalized administrative command center necessarily brings. In other words, under this plan the worst of the worst will become the only.

Finally, as an example of the totalitarian mind, this plan’s proposal to pay for enhanced progressive indoctrination and social-compliance training for all children with money skimmed from the long-term hopes and hard-earned legacies of the dead could not achieve a more perfect symbolism. The circle of tyranny is complete: the State will turn the next generation of citizens into spiritually enslaved worker units and social justice thugs for the progressive elite, pillaging the last will and testament of the previous generation to fund it. 

A question for Harris and other hateful ignoramuses of her sort: Why does the State, which produces nothing but chains and torture, enjoy a limitless right to rape both past and present as a means of projecting itself into the future with impunity, whereas private citizens who work all their lives producing things for society in order to build a bequest for their loved ones, and children full of natural potential and boundless desire for understanding and actualization, have no right to their future?

Of course I already know the answer Harris et al would give, if one could get them drunk enough to tell the truth: “Because the State is the only true Being, from which all your petty and transitory rights are derived — and because public school teachers are at once one of the largest, most monolithic, laziest, and least intelligent demographic groups, and therefore perfect dupes for the condescending flattery (i.e., vote-buying) of democratic communists.”

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