Democrat or Marxist - You Make the Call

Sen. Chris Dodd, former candidate for president, has some ideas about corporate profits that could have come from Karl Marx:

When a high-ranking U.S. senator sounds more like Karl Marx than Adam Smith over the issue of energy prices, it must be an election year.

Democratic Sen. Chris Dodd, the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, appeared on CNBC’s June 10 “Squawk Box” pushing government control of corporate profits. Dodd said he considered a company to be “doing very, very well” with profits above $8 or $10 per barrel of oil. He said he advocated a windfall profits tax, where Congress would determine what amount of profit is fair and what isn’t.

Co-host Joe Kernan called the Connecticut senator on the idea, asking if he was going to apply the same strategy to other types of businesses. “Are you going to go across industries across the board and decide what Congress thinks is a fair amount of profit and drawing a lines on what’s fair and what’s not for corporations?” Kernan then emphasized the point. “That’s not the way it’s done in this country, senator. It could never be done that way, could it?”

“Yes, it could be,” Dodd said. “In fact it’s been done that way in the past and particularly when you’re trying to get some relief for people out here when the economy is in a tailspin. We’re about to go into a recession here. This is really causing a tremendous dislocation, not only here, but around the world.”

Dodd was correct – such a measure has been tried before – the Windfall Profits Tax enacted in 1980. But, according to the American Petroleum Institute (API), 1.26 billion fewer barrels of oil were produced domestically due to the tax.

Fifty-one Senators voted for such a plan this morning, but were rebuffed by a GOP filibuster. How can so many supposedly intelligent people fall for this Marxist twaddle?