On May 13, Forbes magazine ran an Op-Ed piece under the headline: “For De-Friending The U.S., Facebook’s Eduardo Saverin Is an American Hero.”

Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer of New York angrily disagreed.

“It is scary. It is a scary, absurd place where even a tax dodger who renounces America for his own 30 pieces of silver is celebrated as a patriot and an American hero. It is perverse. I am appalled by making heroic a man who renounces citizenship to escape a tax rate of capital gains of 15%.

“No one gets rich in America on their own,” Schumer said. “And when people do well in America, they should do well by America. I believe the vast majority of Americans believe this too.”

From that Op-Ed piece:

“Saverin’s flight from the U.S. is yet another reminder of the superiority of a national consumption tax that in a perfect world would be implemented in concert with the abolition of the I.R.S.”

It’s tempting to imagine a world without an agency to collect taxes. But it’s nightmarish to contemplate a world where there were no taxes to pay for

• a powerful military to protect us;
• an FBI to combat terrorism and organized crime;
• an FAA to safely regulate airline traffic;
• agencies to repair roads;
• agencies to erect public buildings (such as schools, courts and libraries) and
• agencies (such as the EPA and FDA) to protect us from predatory businessmen.

The Op-Ed piece continues:

“A limited federal government is a difficult concept to achieve so long as that same government can grant itself the legal right to tax a certain portion of our incomes.”

Every nation in history–whether a democracy or a dictatorship, whether capitalist, socialist or communist–has understood the absolute necessity for collecting public revenues. And it has created means by which to do so.

“When individuals resist governmental hubris, we should exalt their actions.”

We should, in short, celebrate those who come to the United States to make fortunes they could not make anywhere else–and then, when they do, turn their backs on their adopted country. We should rejoice that they have stuffed billions of dollars more into their already-fat pockets and left their supposed fellow countrymen to shift for themselves.

“Ideally…we’ll implement a consumption tax through which we can limit what we hand over to them to spend. And if the tax is regressive or hits low incomes at the same percentage as high ones, all the better. Everyone should know intimately the cost of government.”

Of course we should have a “regressive” tax that “hits low incomes at the same percentage as high ones.” Of course, those who are barely able to feed their families or can’t afford medical care should pay as much in taxes as a rich parasite who, like Mitt Romney, throws out $10,000 bets like so many dimes.

“And if the loss of Saverin’s millions means fewer government programs will achieve funding, U.S. taxpayers will make up for the Saverin shortfall in spades given the seeming inability of Congress to “sunset” any program.”

For billionaires like Saverin and the well-heeled types who subscribe to Forbes, it doesn’t matter that “fewer government programs will achieve funding.”

Greed-obsessed “swells” like Saverin:

• don’t depend on Medicare–they can easily afford the best doctors money can buy;
• don’t have to depend on Social Security to see them through old age;
• don’t have to worry about standing in food bank lines;
• don’t need to rely on police departments–if they’re threatened, they can easily afford round-the-clock bodybuards;
• don’t need consume protection agencies; if they’re victimized by unscrupulous businessmen, they can hire platoons of lawyers and private detectives.

A contemporary writer who warned of America’s abandonment by its privileged classes was Christopher Lasch.  In his posthumously published last book, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy [2005] he wrote:

“There has always been a privileged class, even in America. But it has never been so dangerously isolated from its surroundings.

“George Bush’s [the president who served from 1989 to 1992] wonderment, when he saw for the first time an electronic scanning device at a supermarket checkout counter, revealed, as in a flash of lightning, the chasm that divides the privileged classes from the rest of the nation.”

Until recently, writes Lasch, American cultural and economic elites willingly shouldered civic responsibilities.  But in post-modern capitalism, a professional elite defines itself as entirely separate from civic concerns:

“The markets on which the fortunes of the new elites rely are tied to enterprises that operate across international borders….They have more in common with their counterparts in Brussels or Hong Kong than with the masses of people in their own country who are not yet plugged into the network of global communications.”

Thus, the privileged class in America–the top 1%–has separated itself from the crumbling public services and industrial cities that are used and lived in by the rest of the country’s citizens.