HILLARY’S REICHSFLUCHSTEUER EMERGES AS A NEW TAX STRAIGHT OUT OF GERMANY, Ira Stoll writes at the New York Sun:

Call it Hillary’s Reichsfluchsteuer. The former secretary of state and senator from New York, Hillary Clinton, reportedly will announce on Wednesday plans to impose an “exit tax” on companies that move their headquarters out of America or merge with foreign firms to escape America’s unreasonably high corporate taxes.

Back in 2012, when Senator Schumer, Democrat of New York, and the then-Speaker of the House, John Boehner, proposed a similar tax on individuals who chose to leave America, the president of Americans for Tax Reform, Grover Norquist, noted that a similar policy “existed in Germany in the 1930s.” Mr. Schumer, Mr. Norquist memorably suggested, “probably just plagiarized it and translated it from the original German.”

Indeed, the Reichsfluchsteuer, or Reich flight tax, was a 25% levy imposed originally not by the Nazis but, rather, on December 8, 1931, by the pre-Hitler, centrist government of Heinrich Brüning, who had a doctoral degree in economics. Not exactly something to try to emulate.

Yes, the socialism of the Weimar era and the National Socialism of its successor flowed into each other much more seamlessly than many earlier history books described, in part because, as Orrin Judd has speculated, we wanted to “rehabilitate [West] Germany into a worthy Cold War ally.” And it’s fascinating how the socialism of the Weimar era and the Frankfurt School flows so effortlessly into the corporatism and self-described “Progressivism” of Barry and Hillary.