You can’t punish the… oh, right. Actually, you can.

@TheDemocrats¹ are try­ing to dis­cred­it Rand Paul by tweet­ing a pic­ture of him next to what appears to be an out-of-con­text quote: «You can’t pun­ish rich people.»

The trou­bling aspects to this are almost too many to count. But I’ll give it a try.

First, it looks like the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty now open­ly con­sid­ers hav­ing wealth a crime. Oth­er­wise, «pun­ish­ment» would­n’t be war­rant­ed, and defend­ing the rich from being pun­ished would­n’t itself be any kind of indict­ment of character.

Sec­ond, the way it’s pre­sent­ed makes it appear as though he is mak­ing a moral state­ment, like «you should­n’t…» or «please don’t pun­ish rich peo­ple.» His point was clear­ly more prac­ti­cal than that. He said it’s a bad idea to try to pun­ish rich peo­ple, and that it does­n’t work. His exam­ple was adding a tax to yachts, which sent ship­build­ing off­shore and cost work­ers in the Unit­ed States jobs. Even the few sen­tences he got in The Hill’s recap make that clear.

It’s hard to argue against that point, too. Regard­less of your belief that wealth will «trick­le-down» from the top to every­one else, I don’t think any­one but a fool would claim that mis­for­tune above does­n’t affect those below. Shit rolls down­hill, and it always has.

What’s most trou­bling about this is how well it high­lights that both democ­rats and repub­li­cans com­plete­ly fail to com­pre­hend how wealth, pow­er, and pol­i­tics work.

You can’t pun­ish the rich, because the only way to do so is to give increas­ing­ly greater author­i­ty and pow­er to the gov­ern­ment. The best-case sce­nario is that that replaces the rich with a new breed of the rich and con­nect­ed. What’s more like­ly is that giv­ing that pow­er to gov­ern­ment enti­ties more deeply entrench­es the wealthy who are already col­lud­ing with politicians.

Rand Paul might actu­al­ly under­stand that. What scares me is that the Democ­rats (and @TheDemocrats) cer­tain­ly do.