You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, nor his male servant, nor his female servant, nor his ox, nor his donkey, nor anything that is your neighbor’s. – Exodus 20:17

Perhaps the most telling aspect of Thomas Piketty’s solution to inequality is his justification. He doesn’t even do it to help the less fortunate*. As I recently blogged, Piketty just does it to be a King Richard. It is the economic version of The Leftist Ethic of Resentfulness.

Mr. Piketty urges an 80% tax rate on incomes starting at “$500,000 or $1 million.” This is not to raise money for education or to increase unemployment benefits. Quite the contrary, he does not expect such a tax to bring in much revenue, because its purpose is simply “to put an end to such incomes.”

Piketty’s recent desire to “put an end to such incomes” is really only one facet of how Leftism violates the 10th Commandment as a fundamental bedrock philosophical principal. There are more than just possessions and property that we can covet from others. We can also covet another person’s self-confidence, equipoise and their general sense of content identity. If we can’t have these things for our own dirty, nasty ids, we can always destroy them in the better integrated people we see around us. If they do anything to well, walk around being far happier than we are; we can always whiz in their Cheerios by telling them to “Check their Privilege.” The weaponized use of the PC buzz-phrase “Check your privilege” is a non-economic way of savagely violating Article 10 of The Decalogue.

The fundamental meaning of “Check your privilege” is that you would not have what you have or accomplish what you have accomplished if you were not given a head start. You white, male, straight, employed, skinny rakish b*st*rds have all had it handed to you on a silver platter. You have no right to be proud of anything you have accomplished. You live in the age of “You Didn’t Build That” President and you deserve to feel guilty for that nice family and livable house. Therefore you have no moral right to object when some overrated liberal comes to stealredistributeensure more Pareto Optimal allocation of your hard-earned wages.

Now as I said earlier, those wages don’t all have to be the stuff you direct deposit into Wells Fargo. The “Check Your Privelege” Movement is ultimately nastier, more despicable and even more malignant than Paul Krugabe after the 3rd self-justifying bong-hit of crack Keynesian “settled science.” The “Check Your Privilege” Movement wants to ruin the basis of your satisfaction with your life and everything you have ever accomplished. Julia Fischer writes an interesting article on CYP for The New Republic. She tells about an exercise she was made to suffer through as a child in school below.

“If you are white, take two steps forward.” “If your parents went to college, take one step forward.” “If you are gay, take two steps back.” Before long, we were sorted according to our supposed privilege—and I’m pretty sure all of us, from the children of real estate moguls up front to the mostly black financial aid students in the rear, felt awful about where we stood.

She goes on to actually justify this PC bilge, but after that lead paragraph, she could have gone home successful. The phrase “…all of us, from the children of real estate moguls up front to the mostly black financial aid students in the rear, felt awful about where we stood.” described the entire purpose of the exercise. Anyone who tells you to “Check your privilege” wants you to feel like crap until you seek absolution from them and they give you permission to feel otherwise. You are all sinners in the hands of an ugly, pissed-off diversity matron.

These is an appropriate answer to being told to “check your privalege.” Brett Stevens articulates it well. “..we reserve the right to deny others entrance into our homes. We also reserve the right to deny them entrance into our bodily orifices, or to give them control over our minds. Not theirs.”

So if I were ever seriously told to “check my privelege,” I think the conversation would go something like this.
Diversity Matron: “Check your privilege, Cisgender Scum.”
Repair Man Jack: “Check your smug cloud. It has enough hot air in it to cause Global Warming.”

This response would be condign because of the malignance of the individual I would be addressing it to. The people telling you to “Check Your Privilege” do not want to improve the world around them. They only want to make your world worse. They are deliberately and systematically violating the 10th Commandment. They are even worse than highly-educated wag-halters like Thomas Piketty. They don’t want your wealth or property; they want a piece of your soul. Feel free to treat them like the pariahs that they truly are.

*-If Thomas Piketty did care whether his confiscation of other people’s property helped the commonweal he could actually manage to be somewhat likeable while he was brutally wrong.