Democrats want to tax billionaires and expand government authority. But California's record raises the obvious question: what did they do with the last fortune?

The newly ascendent socialist left has a simple answer for nearly every social problem: give government more money and more power.

Healthcare crisis? Tax billionaires. Housing crisis? Tax billionaires. Homelessness? Tax billionaires. Inequality? Tax billionaires. Democracy itself? Apparently, tax billionaires.

It is an emotionally satisfying argument, especially in a country where the rich really are very rich, and where many Americans feel squeezed by housing costs, healthcare costs, childcare costs, inflation, debt, and a general sense that the system works better for insiders than for everyone else. 

But fleeting moral satisfaction is not the same thing as public policy. Before California asks billionaires, businesses, or ordinary taxpayers for another pile of money, there is a basic question its leaders should have to answer:

What did you do with the last pile?

California is already the great laboratory of progressive governance. It has the taxes, the programs, the agencies, the nonprofits, the task forces, the moral language, and the one-party political control. 

Yet on homelessness, one of the state’s most visible and urgent crises, the record is brutal. The California State Auditor reported that the state allocated nearly $24 billion to homelessness and housing programs over five fiscal years, from 2018–19 through 2022–23. The same audit found that the state had not done enough to track whether major programs were actually cost-effective.

That is not a small bookkeeping problem. That is the whole ballgame.

If government cannot measure results, it cannot demand trust. If it cannot explain which programs worked, which failed, and why, then “more money” is not a serious answer. It is a reflex. Worse, it becomes a business model. Homelessness stops being a problem government solves and becomes a problem government funds.

This is why the socialist argument is so weak in practice. It treats wealth as the missing ingredient, when very often the missing ingredient is competence. California has not lacked compassion. It has not lacked spending. It has not lacked progressive ambition. What it has lacked is accountability.

Now the same political culture wants to move on to billionaires.

California voters are being asked to consider a one-time wealth tax that would impose a 5 percent tax on net worth above $1 billion for residents and certain trusts tied to the state. Supporters frame it as justice: make the ultra-rich pay for healthcare, education, food assistance, and the social needs the state says are threatened by federal cuts. But this argument depends on an extraordinary assumption: that the same government apparatus that struggles to prove what happened to billions in homelessness spending should now be trusted with even more money and more power.

Show results first.

This is where Democrats are in a terrible position to advocate for socialism, or even socialism-adjacent policy. The party’s insurgent left is not merely calling for higher taxes. It is increasingly arguing that billionaires are oligarchs, capitalism is the root problem, and government must use its power to reorder economic life. Melat Kiros’ defeat of 15-term Rep. Diana DeGette in Denver shows that this is no longer a fringe campus debate. Kiros, a democratic socialist, defeated a long-serving progressive in Colorado’s safely Democratic 1st District, adding to a wave of left-wing primary challenges against the Democratic establishment.

The message is clear: move left, move faster, stop waiting.

But waiting is not always cowardice. Sometimes it is prudence. Sometimes it is realism. Sometimes it is the adult recognition that power should not be handed to people merely because they have identified a real injustice.

Capitalism has failures. Of course it does. Rich people can buy influence. Corporations can behave badly. Markets need rules, competition, fraud enforcement, contract law, antitrust scrutiny, and basic public order. But capitalism has one enormous advantage over socialism: it does not require human beings to become incorruptible.

Socialism does.

Socialism assumes that if enough wealth and authority are moved into the public sector, fair-minded officials will distribute resources wisely. But why would anyone assume that? Government is run by human beings too. Bureaucrats have incentives. Politicians have donors. Agencies protect budgets. Nonprofits protect contracts. Failure often becomes the justification for expansion.

Bad companies can lose customers. Bad products can disappear. Bad ideas can go bankrupt. Bad government programs often get renamed, refunded, and expanded.

Even China proves the point. China did not become wealthy by abolishing markets. It became wealthy by borrowing capitalism: private enterprise, exports, foreign investment, manufacturing, and trade with capitalist countries. If communism needs capitalism to produce wealth, then capitalism is not the failed system in the equation.

The answer to every social problem cannot be: give government more money, more authority, more surveillance, more control, and more permission to punish people who leave.

Before Democrats lecture America about capitalism’s failures, they should be forced to defend progressive government’s results. Not its intentions. Not its slogans. Its results.

California already spent a fortune in billionaire taxes. The broken sidewalks, homelessness, high crime, and civil dysfunction (including the fact that California can’t count ballots in a timely manner or get government workers to return to the office six years after COVID) still tell the story.

(Contributing writer, Brooke Bell)