One of our readers asserted that it was unfair to raise taxes on billionaires and alluded to the famous saying by Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller. Only he put it this way:
First they came for the billionaires. Then they came for the millionaires. Then they came for those with $100,000 a year. Then they came for you. And private property was no longer permitted. That’s what socialists want. No private property for anyone. That used to be called slavery, to the state this time.
Thus, we must object to taxing the billionaires, because taxation inevitably leads to socialism! Never mind that taxation pays for the military, the police, highways, bridges, tunnels, parks, schools, medical and scientific research, and other public functions.
So…
This is what Pastor Niemöller actually wrote:
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
The reader, a contrarian, is neither a socialist, nor a trade unionist, nor a Jew. He typically defends Trump and all his actions.
Our blog poet, SomeDAM Poet, responded with this poem:
First they came for Gates
First they came for Gates
And I did not speak out
About the taxing rates
Cuz Gates was just a lout
Then they came for those
Who have a hundred mill
And I did not oppose
Cuz they were simply swill
Then they came for those
Who have 100k
And I did not impose
No chance, no how, no way
Then they came for me
Who hasn’t got a cent
And I was glad, you see
Cuz jail means food and rent
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Thanks for showing us the original source so we can see how the right wing broadcasters distort content for their dittoheads and to Harlan for parroting the distortion.
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This is not what Niemöller wrote. It is the revisionist/Disneyfied version of what people wish he said. Had a long discourse here with Lloyd a few years about this.
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I don’t think it matters whether he included Communists, Catholics, or Jehovah’s Witnesses. The point remains the same. It’s a statement about nipping suppression, not progressive taxation, in the bud
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Don’t put words in my mouth or assume something I didn’t write. When you respond to historical accuracy with “I don’t think it matters…”, it should make you rethink what you believe. Do some research, folks. History is messy. Signing out.
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From what I have seen, there are various theories about what exactly Niemöller said. I haven’t seen document written by Niemöller. It’s how we interpret history that matters, anyway. I agree with any interpretation that says Hitler was bad and Roosevelt was good.
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I think I remember GregB and Lloyd (or at least someone on here) discussing this quote. I read so much I get a bit confused recalling when and who I was reading… I know the dialogue did send me looking for more information.
Here’s a whole page devoted to the quote. It seems it’s been used for all sorts of purposes -from the noble to the diabolical (a hate group perverting it!) Such is the fate of a powerful idea. http://marcuse.faculty.history.ucsb.edu/niem
Thanks for getting me thinking about it again!
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Greg B
Glad you’re back.
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Greg,
I have missed you! Welcome back!
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Hey, GregB! Welcome back. This is an interesting phenomenon, isn’t it?
I recently wrote a book about veganism and vegetarianism (it’s called Trillions of Universes and is as yet unpublished, alas; a hundred literary agents told me it was above people’s heads and for too small a market, which is interesting because it deals with the fate of the planet, lol). I decided to include in it a catena–a long, connected list of quotations from sometime vegans and vegetarians throughout history–Pythagoras, Plutarch, Schopenhauer, Shelley, Shaw, Nijinsky, Kafka, Gandhi, etc.
Vegans and vegetarians have a growing and extremely active presence online, and they share a lot of memes of famous quotations, so this was a good place to start. However, as I researched the origins of these quotations, I found that a) many had been vastly improved in the process of repetition, as in the children’s game known as telephone or operator; b) most were inaccurately quoted and had acquired a pithiness and figurative power not found in the original; c) many originated with people other than the famous folk they were attributed to; d) many were randomly attributed to various famous persons–Da Vinci, Lincoln, Gandhi, the Buddha, etc.; and e) many were routinely repeated without qualification or comment in printed books by well-known, respected authors, often as epigraphs to those authors’ works.
I was diligent about this. In each case, I didn’t give up until I had a definitive written source in a published work or in unpublished papers or correspondence.
Almost all the memes were wrong.
But such is memory, both our individual memories, which are largely confabulation, and our collective ones. You are right, ofc, that one of the jobs of the historian is to try to get this stuff right.
One of my favorite of these false quotations, in a different field, is “Learning is not the filling of a bucket but the lighting of a fire,” often attributed to Socrates or Yeats or Shaw. The quotation probably originates with the essay called “The right way of hearing,” often translated as “On listening to lectures,” from Plutarch’s Moralia: “For the mind does not require filling like a bottle, but rather, like wood, it only requires kindling to create in it an impulse to think independently and an ardent desire for the truth.” Over the centuries, the quotation has become pithier, more concrete, more powerful.
We need a general term to describe these quotations perfected in the process of their transmission. Perhaps we could call them “memaphorisms.”
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What I read is that Niemöller didn’t write the quote, he spoke, and he changed the content according to the audience. The quote is on display at the holocaust memorial, so it’s probably reasonably accurate—as far as meaning goes.
The quotation stems from Niemöller’s lectures during the early postwar period. Different versions of the quotation exist. These can be attributed to the fact that Niemöller spoke extemporaneously and in a number of settings. Much controversy surrounds the content of the poem as it has been printed in varying forms, referring to diverse groups such as Catholics, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Jews, Trade Unionists, or Communists depending upon the version. Nonetheless his point was that Germans had been complicit through their silence in the Nazi imprisonment, persecution, and murder of millions of people. He felt this was true in particular of the leaders of the Protestant churches.
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So funny!
You are too good, SDP.
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Who is this reader who believes that America had no private property in the 1950s when Dwight D. Eisenhower (marginal tax rate of 90+%) was President?
Who is this reader that believes that America had no private property under Franklin D. Roosevelt?
Who is this reader who thinks that Harry S. Truman did something wicked and evil for enacting Medicare for seniors? What kind of reader would claim that America gave up private property just to keep senior citizens from dying when this reader would have let them die?
What makes a poster like that so evil? Unless they are Russian trolls who know nothing about our country, what would possess them to blatantly lie for the sole purpose to end programs like Medicare so that senior citizens could die?
I don’t understand people like that who would rather lie than honestly discuss whether or not they prefer senior citizens have access to Medicare or not.
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You got that right! https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/12/opinion/sunday/taxes-wealth-poverty.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_191014?campaign_id=2&instance_id=12940&segment_id=17858&user_id=0b7efaaf843601e54e3ef31aad9169d1®i_id=506377171014
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To: “One of my readers” cited above
It’s fascinating how the president has made himself and the wealth victims.
So – the writer equates “coming for them” the way religions and races and rights seekers with being taxed. Yeh – Gates, Walton, et al are victims.
But he describes the endgame perfectly. Less than 1% of Americans own like 60% of the wealth – and pay the lowest percentage of taxes now. So they get richer and as they step on the middle class and working class freezing salaries, killing unions, and denying social services (like lunch for kids in schools) not to mention the 11% living in poverty.
What happens to them in this scenario? Will the 1% do anything about their health, shelter, and jobs? And….. then what? More fences and containment.
The very people who are his base and love him because he’s an angry white guy are the very ones who will be out of work without health insurance and jobs – all caused by him. But they’ll surly be armed.
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The scary thing about all of this is that the wealthy and powerful now have far more powerful tools for surveillance and control than ever before–tools that make Orwell’s Thought Police Helicopters and telescreens and posters whose eyes follow you look like spitballs and yelling “boo.”
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sometimes we might just give thanks that some people are long gone and simply do not have to “see” what there now is to see: it is indeed an overwhelming time to be alive and have an active brain
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Indeed, Ciedie! But this is the darkness before dawn.
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Great ending to the poem, SomeDAM!
I cannot help but notice that there is a revolt in Chile that getting small notice by corporate media in the US. While it is about raising the fare on public transportation, it is really about protesting the neoliberal policies that hollowed out the middle class in Chile. Our corporate owned media does not want to call attention to this class war in Chile.https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/oct/24/democracy-chile-protesters-pinera-pinochet
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Bolivia is also having protests. Their president Evo Morales wants a fourth term even though their constitution limits him to three terms. [When I lived in Bolivia, a former president was running again for office. He had had opponents drugged and thrown out of airplanes.] I taught for two years in Santa Cruz.
Dictators don’t want to give up power.
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Democracy in Bolivia has two faces’: ambivalence as Evo Morales seeks fourth term
…Until recent disastrous wildfires, it seemed likely that Morales’ re-election was inevitable. But the slow government response to the fires which devastated more than 4m hectares (9.9m acres) of forest and arable land provoked large demonstrations in the cities of Santa Cruz, Cochabamba and La Paz in early October.
Protesters also expressed anger over Morales’s efforts to remain in office, despite a previous pledge to leave at the end of his third term as stipulated by Bolivia’s 2009 constitution. That commitment came immediately after he narrowly lost a February 2016 referendum his government called on whether he could stand again…
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/oct/17/bolivia-election-evo-morales-seeks-fourth-term?CMP=share_btn_link
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nonsense. The loopholes created of the power elite allow them to subvert democracy.
American’s wealthy once had to pay taxes.
That’s the rot in our system: Great wealth has translated into immense political power, which is then leveraged to multiply that wealth and power all over again — and also multiply the suffering of those at the bottom. This is a legal corruption that President Trump magnified but that predated him and will outlast him; this is America’s cancer.
Donald Trump promised struggling working-class voters that he heard their frustrations and would act. He did: He pushed through a tax cut that made income inequality worse. In 2018, for the first time, the 400 richest American households paid a lower average tax rate than any other income group, according to new research by two economists.
Those billionaires paid an average total rate of 23 percent in 2018, down from the 70 percent their 1950 counterparts paid. Meanwhile, the bottom 10th of households paid an average of 26 percent, up from 16 percent in 1950.
Two M.I.T. economists, Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo, demolish the traditional arguments against higher taxes on the wealthy in an incisive book coming out next month, “Good Economics for Hard Times.” While major league sports teams have salary caps that limit athletes’ pay, Banerjee and Duflo note that no one argues “that players would play harder if only they were paid a little (or a lot) more. Everybody agrees that the drive to be best is sufficient.”
Considerable evidence suggests that the same is true of C.E.O.s, and that higher tax rates don’t depress effort. In Switzerland, a shift in tax timing meant that the Swiss were not taxed for one year. This tax holiday, which they knew of in advance, turned out to have no impact on how hard people worked, Banerjee and Duflo write.
“High marginal income tax rates, applied only to very high incomes, are a perfectly sensible way to limit the explosion of top wealth inequality,” Banerjee and Duflo write.
There are legitimate concerns about tax evasion, but it would help if the I.R.S. focused its audits less on impoverished Americans claiming the earned-income tax credit and more on wealthy people with murky assets. It’s ridiculous that the county in all America with the highest audit rate is Humphreys County, Miss., which is poor, rural and three-quarters black.
As for the wealth tax, which in Warren’s version would begin at $50 million, there are legitimate concerns about how to value assets, avoid marriage penalties and enable zillionaires to pay when their wealth is illiquid. But we already have a wealth tax — the property tax — that hits widows on Social Security with an illiquid asset (the family home). If these widows can figure it out, tycoons can as well.
Even if Trump disappeared tomorrow, we would still live in a country where the top 1 percent own more than the bottom 90 percent — and where on any given night more than 100,000 children are homeless.
By raising taxes on the wealthy, we could end the lead poisoning that afflicts half a million American kids, we could provide high-quality preschool for all, we could offer treatment for all people with addictions and we could ensure that virtually all kids graduate from a decent high school and at least get a crack at college.
The wealthy would still have more money than they could ever spend: Jeff Bezos would have had $87 billion in 2018 if Warren’s wealth tax had been in place all along, rather than $160 billion, according to calculations of Saez and Zucman. But we would be, I think, a fairer and better nation.
So should we soak the rich? You bet we should.
I wish I wrote this but Nick Kritoff did https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/12/opinion/sunday/taxes-wealth-poverty.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_191014?campaign_id=2&instance_id=12940&segment_id=17858&user_id=0b7efaaf843601e54e3ef31aad9169d1®i_id=506377171014
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Here is Trump freaking out on Twitter again.
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Donald J. Trump
✔
@realDonaldTrump
The Ukraine investigation is just as Corrupt and Fake as all of the other garbage that went on before it. Even Shifty Schiff got caught cheating when he made up what I said on the call!
61.4K
6:44 AM – Oct 26, 2019
Twitter Ads info and privacy
26.9K people are talking about this
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You got this a little backward, Harlan. Here’s how the tale goes. It’s a classic!
The billionaires and millionaires had always preyed upon the poor. Then they came for the middle class, and then the poor and the former middle class ate them.
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The “genius of our great president”? Trump ONLY wants sycophants. Stephanie Grisham made a stupid comment. Nobody is reigning in the president who has no idea where his power ends. Trump is up for impeachment because his gorgeous gut is so much smarter than anyone’s brain.
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Kelly Says He Told Trump a ‘Yes Man’ as His Successor Would Lead to Impeachment
Mr. Kelly’s comments appeared to pin the blame for the inquiry on the president’s embattled acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney.
Oct. 26, 2019
…Mr. Kelly added that “the system that should be in place, clearly — the system of advising, bringing in experts, having these discussions with the president so he can make an informed decision — that clearly is not in place. And I feel bad that I left.”
Mr. Trump and the White House, however, made it clear that the feeling was not mutual.
“I worked with John Kelly, and he was totally unequipped to handle the genius of our great president,” the press secretary, Stephanie Grisham, said in a statement.
The White House also issued a statement under Mr. Trump’s name, disputing that Mr. Kelly ever gave him advice about his successor.
“John Kelly never said that, he never said anything like that,” the president said. “If he would have said that, I would have thrown him out of the office. He just wants to come back into the action like everybody else does.”…
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WaPo:
Trump has attacked the whistleblower at least 40 times on his Twitter account since the Ukraine scandal broke, including on Friday, when he asked, “Where is the whistleblower and why did he or she write such a fictitious and incorrect account of my phone call with the Ukrainian president?”
This is how our GREAT president operates. He HAS to squash anyone who isn’t a sycophant. He doesn’t know who this disloyal person is and it is driving him crazy. 40 times on a Twitter account?
This person had better NEVER be named. His life would be in danger.
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This whole situation just blows my mind. The President of the United States is being allowed by the Congress to use his power to THREATEN a US citizen. And it’s not the first time. Complete and total acceptance by the Republicans and the Democrats. This right here is an impeachable (and removal from office) offense in my book. Is this not an abuse of power of the most heinous kind? “L’Etat c’est moi” and if you disagree, I will destroy you. Is that the country our representatives want us to live in? Sure, you might say that it’s not directed at you so what the hell. But I say that the citizen it may be directed at someday is YOU, and that a threat like this is a threat to ALL of us.
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The whistleblower doesn’t need to testify. Everything that he/she said has been confirmed by high-level diplomats.
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Diane: Trump has complained 40 times on Twitter about the whistleblower. He can’t stand the thought of someone talking against his ‘perfect’ actions. He wants a filthy name to attach to this unnamed person and to dig him into the ground.
HIs narcissism demands that he retaliate since he is the best president this country has ever had. [barf]
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Yeah, he wants the name so he can bully the person.
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There is a whistleblower law to protect people who tell the truth from reprisals.
Trump doesn’t know about this law. He knows the code of the Mafia.
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Lol. The tax trickle down theory. What’s needed is for taxes to trickle up. If this drowns out the billionaires, so be it. Small price to pay.
I also volunteer to pay half a dollar extra taxes to feed the billionaires in prison.
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Máté Wierdl: “I also volunteer to pay half a dollar extra taxes to feed the billionaires in prison.”
You’re way too generous. I’d donate a penny if I felt like being in a generous mood. Nothing for them if I felt unhappy over all the inequality and destruction that they spread.
They’d better catch me on a good day.
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Well, Carolm, I pay my taxes so that everybody can get a reasonable living. I do not want my taxes to make any distincton, whatsoever, among people.
Besides, it would be my pleasure to serve breakfast to Gates in prison.
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Máté Wierdl: Okay. You win. $.50 a year would give them a reasonable living standard in prison.
I’ll let you serve Gates breakfast. I’d prefer to serve breakfast to a tall, fairly young, very good-looking fellow who is wealthy but not a billionaire. Do you catch my drift?
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Yeah, Carolm. I catch it. Perhaps he can channel some his youthful energy to help with making, say, coffee? 🙂 At least this is what I tried to have my kids do with not exactly full success.
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