It’s a bit rich for Morneau to attack the wealthy.

Aaaack! What did the federal finance minister just say? Did he really just discover that rich people take advantage of complexities in the tax code to pay less? Can’t anybody here play this game?

Perhaps you thought I was going to complain about him socking it to the economy by aiming at the rich. And I am. But all in good time, because there’s so much wrong here.

In a way it is not surprising that the Trudeau administration keeps raising the overall tax burden on citizens. How could they not, when they are convinced in theory that government is the answer to everything and determined in practice to make it bigger? Somebody has to pay for it and you’d think they’d know that.

Well, some of them, anyway. The Prime Minister genuinely might be an affable dunce. It also might be a convincing act by a clever, privileged guy who drifted breezily through early adulthood before ambitious vanity kicked in. It’s hard to tell. But Bill Morneau can’t be a fool. Can he?

According to Wikipedia, “Morneau was executive chair of Canada’s largest human resources firm, Morneau Shepell, and the former chair of the C.D. Howe Institute…. Morneau was educated at the UWO and the London School of Economics ( LSE).” And such resumés rarely belong to fools or naifs. Yet what comes from his mouth is so uncannily like folly that either he, too, is putting on a superb act or else politics does something to people’s brains, so warping their sense of perspective that they might as well be fools for all the good their intelligence and experience do them or us.

Here’s what Morneau actually said: “Many of the richest Canadians are unfairly exploiting the tax rules designed to help businesses thrive. We know that businesses, including small businesses, help grow the Canadian economy. These tax advantages are in place to help these businesses reinvest and grow, find new customers, buy new equipment and hire more people. We want to make sure those rules are used to do just that, and not to give unfair tax advantages to certain — often high- income — individuals.”

Is that a fright wig and red putty nose you’re wearing? Are you seriously complaining that rich people hire accountants and lawyers to help them navigate through our absurdly complex tax code to happy low- tax havens? Like, say, one J. Trudeau, who lashed out at sheltering income in small companies after routing his own juicy speaking fees through a numbered corporation. Dawk.

What would be astonishing about Morneau’s statement even in the mouth of some untutored leftist idealist, and is incomprehensible in that of a man of business, very wealthy, very important, is his bafflement that people respond to incentives. It’s not just the Liberals’ fault, of course. The Harper Conservatives posed as free marketeers but made the tax code enormously longer and more complicated. And the only defence they might present, if defence it be, is that their rhetoric about helping businesses was deliberate babble to screen cynical targeting of key voting groups with free money.

I know, I know. Hardly a policy of glory. But Alexandre Dumas preferred rogues to fools because rogues take vacations. And it would have the virtue of being grounded in reality, unlike the daffy hope that people will react to what you were trying to do with the tax code, not what you actually did. Or being shocked and appalled to find that rich people are better able to take advantage of baroque tax loopholes than working stiffs.

Especially because Morneau is a rich person himself, he’d have to be an utter klonk not to know that if you build it they will come, and the more it’s worth to someone to find a convenient loophole the harder they’ll look for it. What’s the point of saying they do it “unfairly”? What they do is legal, and they didn’t write the tax code. They just stagger around under its appalling weight like the rest of us. And they don’t like it any more than we do.

So now to the business about clobbering the economy with ever- increasing taxes and dreaming of funding vast social programs by squeezing the rich and driving entrepreneurship out of Canada.

You’d assume, and hope, people like the former executive chair of Morneau Shepell and former chair of C. D. Howe would understand, and impress upon their colleagues, that you cannot prosper or fund a voracious government that way, that it’s good to close loopholes and simplify the tax code but not while also continually raising rates. But if they appear in public slack- jawed with amazement that rich people exploit tax breaks, you find yourself in turn slack- jawed with amazement that politics renders even smart people stupid.

Can’t anybody here play this game?

WHAT THEY DO IS LEGAL, AND THEY DIDN’T WRITE THE TAX CODE. — ROBSON