The socialists who have been taking over the Democratic Party lately have a problem—the state and local jurisdictions where they are able to seize power still have to compete with rival jurisdictions that are still relatively friendly to private property and capitalist businesses. The principal targets of egalitarian fury, namely possessors of great wealth, are strongly incentivized to escape from dystopian hell-holes created by socialists to saner locales. Even those who aren’t so clearly targeted as objects of envy suffer from the effects of economic and social decline and are also incentivized to leave.
Even worse from a socialist perspective, the US Constitution restricts what a state or local government can do in terms of seizing private property. The owner of any property taken for public use must be compensated, so a local socialist enterprise can’t get around the problem of having to raise capital (and later to cover the inevitable losses associated with socialist production) with the help of government funding. However, a government’s power to tax only applies within its own jurisdiction; rich people aided by clever lawyers can figure out how to break their tax “nexus” to an oppressive jurisdiction in order to shield themselves, their businesses, and most or all of the associated wealth in other, much less extortionate jurisdictions.
Two jurisdictions where mass flight from Democratic misrule is unmistakable are California and New York City, both of which have lately experienced a net emigration of more than 100,000 residents per year. While lower-tax states like Texas and Florida are well-known destinations for such blue state refugees, in the case of New York City even the just slightly-less overgoverned New Jersey has become a magnet for a lot of former New Yorkers—it takes a lot for a true Gothamite to suffer the indignity of making that move.
One of the consequences of such flight is that as the tax base shrinks, the pressure on committed socialist ideologues to extort whatever wealth remains even more rapidly (before it too flees from their grasp) mounts. Likewise, there is also pressure to tax things that have previously been left untaxed and might still be within reach, thus pushing the envelope of whatever forms of soaking the rich are permitted by the US Constitution.
Hellbound and Down 