Capital Extraction vs. Capital Creation

As I watched Peter Schweizer and Breitbart News’ Stephen K. Bannon’s “Boom Town” special over the weekend, the message was clear–Washington DC is a boom town not because of capital creation but because of capital extraction, and these two are not the same.

In other words, there’s a stark difference between creating a product so desirable people will spend their hard earned money to get it and building a bureaucracy so powerful that it simply confiscates the people’s money and lines the pockets of the ruling class.  

But this is where we are. And as result, Washington DC is booming, albeit a boom based on spending other people’s money.

If you really want to understand this, just ask yourself how other boom towns got their start. For instance, what did Silicon Valley do? Silicon Valley boomed because it was home to tech companies that made products people simply could not live without.

Yet Washington DC just passed Silicon Valley for the highest per-capita income in the entire U.S.

What product is designed or manufactured in Washington DC? Nothing. DC isn’t into selling, it’s into taking. 

And because of this influx of other people’s money, Peter Schweizer makes it clear that DC has the highest rate of fine wine consumption in the U.S., that seven of the ten wealthiest counties in the U.S. are counties around the DC region, and that the capital city is increasingly overrun with Maserati, Ferrari, and Lamborghini dealerships. 

Is this what the Founding Fathers intended? Certainly not. It does, however, prove the truth of the oft’ stated maxim, “The power to tax is the power to enslave.” For by using taxes to extract capital from the people, the ruling class has enslaved the same. 

Therefore, while Americans across the fruited plain struggle to make ends meet, the politically entrenched in DC are ordering fine wine not by the glass, but by the bottle.