THE COMMISSARS WHO HATE KULAKS

Saturday, 9:00 AM.  19 degrees F, wind W, calm enough that yesterday’s snow still clings to the pine needles.  Humidity 81%, barometer 30.12 in.  the southeastern and southern horizons are filled with dark clouds which merge almost imperceptibly to gray then white and finally blue skies to the north and west.
        As readers will doubtless recall, Joseph Stalin hated the middle class, the Bourgeoisie, and like all Communists sought their destruction.  But more than they or any other class, he hated the Kulaks, the independent landed farmers who were commoners and not part of the nobility, and he actively sought not just to crush this class he could not subject, but to kill them as individuals, and he set his Commissars on track to do the dirty job.  He was immensely successful on both counts, and Russia has suffered from an anemic agricultural economy since the 1930’s, when millions and millions of Kulaks were starved to death.  It’s hard to raise food if there is nobody left alive who knows how to farm.
        The Democratic Party and the current occupant of the White House profess to love the American Family Farm and its farmers, the American Kulaks, who own their own land and operate as small businesses, rather than as corporations or mere cogs in mega-corporations. But regardless of what the party  and the President profess, they are insistent on the demise of the family farm, and one can only conclude that they secretly hate what they profess to love, for they are indeed trying to kill the family farm. 
        How? By proposing to raise inheritance taxes drastically.  The current death tax exempts up to five million dollars per estate.  The proposed death tax would cut the exemption to one million dollars, and drastically raise the tax rates on estates above that amount, which would affect most economically successful, non-corporate, family owned farms.  Therefore when a successful family farm owner dies, the farm will likely die with him, as his heirs will in most cases not be able to assume the death tax burden. 
        The only alternative for most family farms will be to become corporations if they can before they are subject to the death tax,    or to sell out to the large farm corporations, or to subdivide into small parcels, thus effectively taking precious farm acreage out of meaningful agricultural production.  I’m not a tax lawyer or an agricultural economist, but I think I’ve got this scenario dead right.
        I hesitate to speculate as to why the farthest leftwing Democrats and this President hate the American family farmers so.  But of course I will anyway. 
        I can think of no reason that the current administration should have the destructive attitudes that they do, except that they  have been steeped in Marxist-Leninist theory and propaganda for so long that they have simply all become, perhaps subconsciously, Commissars Who Hate Kulaks; and they simply cannot abide individuals who are economically and politically independent of the collective society they wish to foist upon us all.