Tax the Rich! I can see it now. Walmart clothed and shod Black Friday crowds brandishing torches and pitchforks as a top-hatted plutocrat, hundred dollar bills fluttering from his trouser pockets, clambers up the windmill, while flames leap higher and higher and Don Quixote couches his lance - oh, I'm getting all carried away again.
Sorry about that.
My point is that "Tax the Rich" has a threatening, punitive tone. "Make them pay" is a phrase that is most often followed by "for their crimes." As if being rich were a crime in itself.
Which, under certain circumstances, one could argue - but no. Not going there. I have an entirely different take on why we should Tax the Rich. And it isn't because we hate them. It's because we (probably stretching a point here) love them. Because they are, income aside, some of us. They are an integral part of our community. And as such, they should be included in the communal enterprise. In the general welfare, as our Constitution so generously provides.
That being so, the well-being of the cities where they live, of the states where they do business, and of the citizens of these communities who contribute in a multitude of ways to their wealth, is as much their concern as their own bottom line. Without their full participation in the entire enterprise of civilization, they are isolated, untethered beings with no connection to the rest of humanity.
Without their full participation, we no longer see them as some of us. We cannot be expected to care about them, in any way. As long as they hold out on full participation in the civic project that made their wealth possible in the first place, we have no reason to respect them, no reason to wish them well, no reason to put down the torches and pitchforks.
Without their full and willing participation in the civic enterprise, Tax the Rich will continue to have a threatening, punitive ring to it. It's only when they begin to see themselves as owing rather than being owed that we can welcome them back to the fold. Then, perhaps, we can appreciate more what they have done for us rather than what they have done to us.