Kamala Harris Goes Full Marxist on the Campaign Trail

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris

On Sunday, less than 48 hours before election day, Kamala Harris shouted out a full lefty communist position. She cheered equitable treatment over equality.

Harris said that equality is not enough because “not everybody’s starting out from the same place.”

“Equitable treatment means we all end up at the same place,” she said.

The only way you can have everyone end up at the same position is by central planning and taking from the most productive.

This is right out of Karl Marx.

"From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" is a slogan popularized by Marx in his 1875 Critique of the Gotha Program.

Andrew Sullivan commented:

Remarkably, the Biden-Harris campaign is putting out her comments as an ad:

 

As I have been warning there are some hardcore leftists at the epicenter of the BH campaign and they are aggressively advancing their cause.

But note well, the claim that Harris is making, that those who start out with less can't compete at the same level, is a direct contradiction of the observations that the Austrian school economist Israel Kirzner has made about entrepreneurship and profit.

And Steven Horwitz notes:

[F.A.Hayek] observed in The Constitution of Liberty that if we want equality of outcomes, we will have to treat people unequally. If, however, we treat people equally, we will get unequal outcomes. Hayek’s argument was premised on the fact that human beings are not equal in our native intelligence, strength, skills, and abilities. Although we can all change and improve those things, they are always constrained by differences in natural gifts.

If we wish to have social progress, especially for the least well-off, we need to find ways to ensure that we can take advantage of the different knowledge, skills, and abilities of other people. For Hayek, market exchange guided by the signals of prices and profits is how we do so. What such an arrangement requires, however, is that individuals be treated equally before the law.

The differences among humans are, in Hayek’s view, a reason to treat them equally, not differently:  “It is of the essence of the demand for equality before the law that people should be treated alike in spite of the fact that they are different.”

In other words, equality before the law, not different rules for different people in an attempt to establish equity which only suffocates the productive and creative and thus lowers the standard of living for all.  

 -RW