Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate and Senator Bernie Sanders (I, VT) is outraged. Outraged, he says.

It is outrageous that the wealthiest corporate executives in America get unlimited, special tax privileges on hundreds of millions of dollars in savings, while ordinary workers can only get tax deferment of up to $19,500 on their 401(k)s[.]

Of course, the (Democratic) Socialist’s answer is to raise taxes on those executives’ savings, their executive retirement and deferred compensation accounts.  He wants to “sharply curb” the tax benefits associated with those accounts. Because, after all, there comes a time when they’ve made enough money. And they didn’t earn that money, anyway; they had help.

Never mind that however earned, it’s certainly not Government’s money; it’s still the earner’s money. Never mind that Government has no business dictating to any of the citizens who employ it how much “enough” is.

Never mind, either, that yeah, they did earn the money. They took the risks—exacerbated by excessive Government regulation—they put in the time and sweat. And the help they had—their employees, not Government—were well paid. Even the low/no skill minimum wage worker was well paid for the value of his work—those, that is, who were able to stay employed or to find work in the first place after Government minimum wage diktats priced them out of low/no skill required jobs.

No, the right answer does not include capping the success of the most successful or increasing the tax bite on those most successful.  Success isn’t capped just on the Evil Rich, though.  The success on all of us is capped: that tax deferment limit doesn’t only apply to our 401(k)s; there are even more draconian caps on our 403(b)s, our Traditional IRAs, our Roth IRAs.  Those caps are not the right answer, either; they’re part of the same error.

Capping success, though, is all this (Democratic) Socialist and his Progressive-Democratic Party confreres know to do.

The right answer, the non-socialist answer, the free market capitalist answer, is to stop capping success.  Leave off the attempts to confiscate the proceeds of executive success and eliminate the caps on the tax deferability of the contributions the rest of us make to our savings and retirement accounts. The money in those accounts and the money we could contribute additionally, were those caps eliminated, also is not Government’s money. It’s ours.

And so is our success.

Full stop.