Atlanta rapper 2 Chainz is the latest hip-hop follower of Friedrich Hayek.
He’s just released “Sam,” which is from his new album “Rap or Go to the League.”
“Sam” refers to Uncle Sam, and the 41-year-old 2 Chainz (born Tauheed Epps) gripes about Sam taxing people like him too heavily. The way he puts it is, “takin’ grams out the bag.”
The rapper acknowledges in the song that he’s “been on both sides of the fence” — he was once poor — yet he laments that his taxes go to pay salaries of cops who crack down on minority communities.
He suggests that the federal government unfairly targets famous people for failure to pay taxes, recalling the mid-2000s tax evasion case that put actor Wesley Snipes in prison for three years. “Don’t let ’em try to Wesley you. You get rich, they gon’ try to Wesley you.”
Another rapper, Cardi B, used a now-deleted Instagram post to inveigh against high taxes, asking, with typical rapper bluntness, what’s being done with her “f–king tax money.” She complained, “I’m from New York, the streets is always dirty. It’s one of the dirtiest cities in America. What is y’all doing? There’s rats on the damn trains. I know y’all not spending it in no damn prison.”
It’s no surprise that people who come into wealth don’t want the government to take a big slice of it. It’s exacerbated in hip-hop by the taxpayers’ hostility toward the police.
Hip-hop musicians tend to rally behind the Left’s causes. But it would be naive to expect them to join the Left in demanding higher taxes.
