Thomas Sowell‘s latest column delves into the Left’s antipathy toward achievement.

Do the people who cheer this kind of talk bother to stop and think through what she is saying? Or is heady rhetoric enough for them?

People who run businesses are benefiting from things paid for by others? Since when are people in business, or high-income earners in general, exempt from paying taxes like everybody else?

At a time when a small fraction of high-income taxpayers pay the vast majority of all the taxes collected, it is sheer chutzpah to depict high-income earners as somehow subsidized by “the rest of us,” whether through paying for the building of roads or the educating of the young.

Since everybody else uses the roads and the schools, why should high achievers be expected to feel like freeloaders who owe still more to the government, because schools and roads are among the things that facilitate their work? According to Elizabeth Warren, it’s because it is part of an “underlying social contract.”

Conjuring up some mythical agreement that nobody saw, much less signed, is an old ploy of the Left — one that goes back at least a century, when Herbert Croly, the first editor of The New Republic magazine, wrote a book titled “The Promise of American Life.”

Whatever policy Herbert Croly happened to favor was magically transformed by rhetoric into a “promise” that American society was supposed to have made — and, implicitly, that American taxpayers should be forced to pay for.