Although it doesn’t show up on balance sheets I’m sure there is intellectual capital that is headed for Gault’s Gulch as well as the financial capital:
Spain saw close to a 40 percent rise in capital outflow in June, Bank of Spain data showed on Friday, as investor confidence in a country struggling to balance its public accounts eroded further.
The central bank reported that net capital outflow, not including central bank operations, was 56.6 billion euros ($71 billion) in June, after an outflow of 41.3 billion euros in May.
A total of 315.6 billion euros of capital has left the country in the year to end-June, equivalent to nearly one-third of the country’s economic output. In the first half of 2012 capital outflow was 220 billion euros.
Emphasis added.
This is one of the Achilles Heels of the “tax the rich” schemes. Those that demand “tax the rich, feed the poor, until there are rich no more” can succeed, but the success is achieved in an unintended manner. The rich, in essence, evaporate. They either leave the country and take both their intellectual and financial wealth with them or they say, “It’s not worth it” and just stop producing wealth. In either case the looters run out of places to loot. The end result is that everyone is worse off than if the looters had produced wealth on their own rather than demanded they be given the wealth of others.
Socialism is like a herd of hogs turned loose in a corn field. They feed extraordinarily well for a few days but destroy the crop that should have lasted through the winter and provided seed for the following year.
Once again, I am reminded of a line from a minor Tom Hanks movie, “Every Time We Say Goodbye”.
In it, he proudly announces that his father is a socialist. His love interest replies, with a smile, “so we can all be poor together?”
We can eat up the rich, as you say, “tax the rich, feed the poor, until there are no rich no more”, at which time, I guess the poor can eat one another.
Some (including me) would say that this is the plan.
If you want the power of coercive control, it doesn’t do to have inspired people doing dynamic things, being all self-sufficient. No, Precious. It doesn’t do at all.
Such people don’t need you. They don’t depend on you. They don’t ask your permission for things and that makes you look like the irrelevant piece of crap you are. They have to be put down one way or the other, and of they end up shrugging and giving up, so much the better– you’re less likely to have to round them up and shoot them.
In what I’ve called the never-ending quest for relevance (by and for the political class) the end result is that everyone else must be made smaller somehow. The self anointed political leaders are worthless turds, and so you have to be less than a worthless turd, crawling on your hands an knees to them for material support, or they are nothing special at all.
This news fits perfectly. Ask yourself if the uber left over there will take this news as a sign that they need to change their belief system and start advocating for property rights. They won’t. Economic destruction is a feature, not a bug.
Hopefully, enough of their useful idiots will wake up and put out the socialists before the mass chaos and death gets out of hand.