This “I need to pay more taxes” phenomenon might have the same psychological roots.

Since I’m not a mental health professional (side note: isn’t that 3-word combination a scary thought all by itself?), I’m free to speculate. It probably has something to do with self-loathing. And in the case of the Jews following the pied piper and Taxaholics, the self-loathing is enough to wish the retribution on everyone who is like the self-loather, because if it was only personal, nothing prevents the self-loather from giving everything he owns to the government. But that never happens, does it?

By destroying wealth that the evil capitalists have earned, and redistributing it to the undernourished, underprivileged, underappreciated masses, the feel-good factor is satiated and made whole. There is no way to attach a value to it unless a person of great wealth who attained that wealth through hard work, great effort and self-sufficency is brought to crushing insolvency by the owners of the chalice of wealth redistribution! Hail the redistributionists! Long may they reign.

(the preceding in no way reflects my true sentiments, which I cannot publish here for fear of being hunted down by the obamabots and left in a cell to die)

If this article proves anything, it is that there is no positive correlation between having money and having brains.

How laughable, how pathetic, that these 40 crackpot petitioners –– who propose to redistribute the wealth of 2.2M of their fellow wealthy Germans –– can be taken seriously –– taken seriously even by the Leftist media.

“One signer, 69-year-old Peter Vollmer told AFP he backed the petition because he had inherited ‘a lot of money I do not need.’”

So how does it help the economy by withdrawing Herr Vollmer’s money from the bank –– the bank which has presumably put the money to work in the private sector –– and recycling it though the government into arbitrary spending projects, or into “urgent programmes like education”?

Ridiculous.

Note the automatic assumption that increased government spending will “give the recession-hit economy a boost.”

This assumption is always accepted without question, as settled fact, with almost scientific finality. To deviate from this accepted wisdom is to stigmatize oneself as a heretic –– or worse, as a racist. Why, to take exception to this assumption is enough to get you sacked at MIT, or locked out of the Congressional committee room.

Yet, if the Austrian school of economics is right –– and the theoretical and empirical evidence suggests that they are right –– the best political approach would be precisely the opposite of that advocated here by Dr. Kelmkuhl, Herr Vollmer, and the other 38 German loonies.

Indeed, higher taxes and increased government spending on arbitrarily chosen projects will only destroy capital formation, misallocate resources, and generate economic imbalances that will impair and delay an economic recovery. As we currently see here in the USA, high taxes and increased government spending have done nothing to address the problems that led to the present recession.

Thus we have the spectacle yesterday of White House chief economist Christina Romer, who testified to Congress, predicting that the massive Obama Stimulus “will likely be contributing little to growth” next year.

According to one report, the $787B Obama Stimulus has generated about 30,000 private sector jobs –– in other words, it cost the American taxpayers about $26M in added government spending for each job created.

Madness.