By now, almost everything imaginable has been said about Senator Kerry’s docking of his new $7 million yacht in Rhode Island instead of Massachusetts, thus avoiding/postponing some $500,000 in state taxes. Here is some postmortem analysis:
1. Once again, a liberal proponent of higher and more redistributive taxes (e.g., Daschle, Geithner, Rangel) has acted antithetically to what he professes. In his 2004 campaign, Kerry alleged near-treasonous behavior (“Benedict Arnold”) on the part of companies that relocated out of the country to seek lower taxes. The psychology of this hypocrisy is hard to figure: Does the technocratic guardian class believe that, as an overseeing nomenklatura, the laws should not apply to thems? Does loud support for taxes in the abstract serve as some sort of surrogate ethical compensation for avoiding them in the concrete? Or is there an assumption that such elites won’t get caught (remember, Geithner and Kerry only paid up when public attention turned to their avoidance)?
2. Economics 101 suggests that, had Massachusetts either no or very low taxes regarding yachts, it might have recaptured some of the revenue that is now Rhode Island’s.
3. Is the liberal wing of the Democratic party now the choice of the very rich who see no dichotomy between their own enjoyment of the highest life and public remonstration against the wealthy? A pattern has certainly emerged: Yachtgate, the populist Clintons’ multi-million-dollar wedding extravaganza, John “Two Americas” Edwards’s mansion, green/live-within-our-limited-means Al Gore at home in Montecito and various other digs, and our “spread the wealth” and “redistributive change” president’s fondness for celebrity-studded banquets, golf, and exclusive vacation hideaways.
4. At some point, all the soak/attack-the-rich talk from the Obama administration (e.g., the lectures about going to the Super Bowl, the caricatures of Las Vegas, the attacks on executives and surgeons) begins to clash with all this conspicuous consumption, especially given that Obama has made a trope of “at some point you’ve made enough money” (a point that someone capable of buying a $7 million accessory has reached, perhaps). What Kerry calls a family “investment” would, in intrusive liberal orthodoxy, appear to others as an indulgence at a time when unemployment lingers near 10 percent and we are struggling to get out of recession.
5. Note how all this wealth was made: John Edwards made it summarizing personal-injury cases against doctors; Al Gore by hyping a global-warming Armageddon and then offering psychological and concrete ameliorations for it; John Kerry by marrying someone who had married someone who had inherited it. This suggests that some of the most influential of the rich Democratic elite don’t have much experience with the role of low taxes or less regulation in fostering profitable, capital-creating enterprises.