A Trenz Pruca’s Journal Reflection and 2025 Update
I. What I Wrote Back in 2012
In 2012 in Trenz Pruca’s Journal I wrote (https://trenzpruca.wordpress.com/2012/07/22/adam-smith-and-the-rich/) Adam Smith, way back in the 18th Century, while he was busy inventing the economic system we now call capitalism, attempted to explain why—despite our moral obligation to tax the super-rich at something close to the peak of the Laffer Curve—we hesitate to do so.
We know that the point of a progressive tax system is to extract the maximum sustainable revenue from those with the greatest ability to pay. And yet socially and politically, we resist taxing the wealthy—even when the arithmetic requires it.
Smith observed that when it comes to the hard-working rich (as opposed to the merely well-born rich), we sympathize with the type of person who:
“devotes himself forever to the pursuit of wealth and greatness…
With the most unrelenting industry he labors night and day…
serves those whom he hates and is obsequious to those whom he despises…
[I]n the last dregs of life, his body wasted with toil and diseases,
his mind galled and ruffled by the memory of a thousand injuries and disappointments…
he begins at last to find that wealth and greatness are mere trinkets of frivolous utility…
Power and riches… keep off the summer shower, not the winter storm,
but leave him always as much, and sometimes more exposed than before,
to anxiety, to fear, and to sorrow;
to diseases, to danger, and to death…” (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/219)
We admire the struggle even when the prize is hollow.
The economist Brad DeLong added a modern gloss to this argument, noting that:
“we don’t wish to disrupt the perfect felicity of the lifestyles of the rich and famous;
and we don’t wish to add to the burdens of those who have spent their most precious possession —
their time and energy — pursuing baubles.” (https://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/11/why-do-we-respe.html)
The two explanations are not logically consistent—but consistency has never been required to shape political psychology.
II. Now, 13 Years Later — Under the Trump Administration
More than a decade has passed since that 2012 reflection, and the patterns Smith described have not faded. They have intensified.
Over the last decade, American politics has transformed into something closer to a theater of aspirational envy and grievance. Our cultural reverence for wealth—once merely romantic—has now hardened into a political reflex. Under the current Trump administration, that reflex has become the operating software of governance.
The wealthy have grown wealthier; inequality has accelerated; and our collective hesitance to tax the rich has evolved from a psychological quirk into an explicit political doctrine.
From Admiration to Deference
The shift is subtle but profound.
In 2012, admiration for the wealthy shaped tax policy at the margins.
In 2025, deference to wealth shapes the entire agenda.
The Trump administration has embraced the idea that the rich must never be burdened. Tax cuts are not an economic tool—they are a moral imperative. Regulation is not public oversight—it is “persecution.” Enforcement of existing tax law is cast as “deep-state interference.”
The political class has turned from praising wealth to worshiping it. Billionaires are treated not as citizens but as indispensable national assets—fragile, sensitive, and in constant need of pampering.
Victimhood for the Wealthy
A striking development since 2012 is the transformation of the richest individuals into cultural symbols of grievance. The wealthiest people in human history claim to be victims—of taxation, of journalists, of regulators, of democracy itself.
This inversion—where billionaires are portrayed as persecuted minorities—is a hallmark of the Trump era. And it fundamentally reshapes the politics of taxation:
If the wealthy are victims, then taxing them is cruelty.
If they are persecuted, then oversight is tyranny.
If they are heroes of capitalism, then regulation is sabotage.
This argument works because it exploits Adam Smith’s insight:
we sympathize with those who strive, even if the striving is futile or self-punishing.
III. The Politics of Aspiration and the Myth of the “Temporarily Embarrassed Billionaire”
One of the most enduring features of American political culture is the tendency of the middle class to identify upward, not horizontally or downward. In the Trump era, this tendency has been deliberately cultivated into a political identity:
Americans are encouraged to see themselves not as workers, neighbors, or citizens—but as temporarily embarrassed billionaires, awaiting their rightful ascent.
This identification makes taxing the wealthy feel like extinguishing one’s own future. The political effect is powerful:
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Tax cuts for the rich feel like personal victories.
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Regulation of corporations feels like personal risk.
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Enforcement of tax law feels like an attack on “success.”
This dynamic is exactly what Adam Smith warned against: an emotional allegiance to wealth that blinds us to the structural consequences of allowing wealth to concentrate without limit.
IV. The Laffer Curve Becomes a Dogma
In my original 2012 post, the Laffer Curve was a technical concept. Under the Trump administration, it has been rewritten into a one-line article of faith:
Taxes on the rich must always be lower.
It no longer matters whether the evidence supports this. The Laffer Curve has ceased to be a graph and has become a creed. And like any creed, it resists contradiction.
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Economic data that disproves it is dismissed.
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Budget deficits caused by tax cuts are ignored.
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Public needs — schools, infrastructure, healthcare — are reframed as luxuries, not obligations.
The result is a fiscal policy that treats the wealthy not as contributors to society but as delicate flowers whose comfort must be protected at all costs.
**V. Are We Still in Thrall to the Rich?
The Trump Administration and America’s Great Deference Machine**
So here we are, thirteen years after that original TPJ essay.
Has America outgrown the Smithian admiration for the wealthy?
If anything, it has become more entrenched.
The Trump administration has clarified a national truth that was always hiding in our political subconscious: we are still in thrall to the rich. But the nature of that thrall has shifted.
1. Billionaires as Policymakers
Billionaires no longer merely influence policy—they author it.
Wealth is now treated as a qualification for public office.
The result: a tax code written by those who benefit most from its loopholes.
2. Billionaires as Martyrs
Any attempt to investigate, regulate, or tax the wealthy is framed as persecution.
Trump has cultivated an image of the rich as embattled patriots—besieged by government, media, and democracy itself.
3. Billionaires as Aspirational Figures
Millions of Americans identify with billionaires in a quasi-religious way.
The wealthy are avatars of possibility, to criticize them is to criticize ambition, and to tax them is to tax hope.
4. Billionaires as Cultural Symbols
The wealthy have become symbols in the American culture war.
Their jets, their estates, their excesses—once objects of satire—are now proof of victory in a political contest.
5. Billionaires as Clients of the State
Most striking of all: the public sector increasingly behaves like a service provider for private wealth.
Government exists to remove “burdens” from them.
The IRS becomes an inconvenience.
Regulators become enemies.
Public spending becomes a threat.
The wealthy have become the only constituency whose comfort is treated as a national priority.
VI. Conclusion: Adam Smith Saw This Coming
Adam Smith warned that human beings are not rational maximizers. We are narrative creatures. We sympathize with the wealthy because we admire striving, even striving that leads to misery.
In 2012, this insight explained America’s reluctance to tax the rich.
In 2025, it explains something more troubling:
Our admiration for the wealthy has hardened into political obedience.
Taxation, regulation, oversight, and enforcement have all been reframed—not as civic obligations, but as moral trespasses. And in that transformation, the democratic project itself has been bent.
The task before us is not merely raising taxes on the rich—though that remains necessary.
It is dismantling the cultural machinery that convinces us that the wealthy are fragile, persecuted, and unimpeachable.
Smith would tell us plainly that our sympathy, however understandable, is misplaced.
The wealthy do not need our protection.
Democracy does.
