Unequal Protection: The vice president's chief economic adviser has decided that one group of Americans doesn't need all the money it earns. What gives him such authority?

Joe Biden's top economic adviser, Jared Bernstein — who does not hold an economics degree — entered on Tuesday the tax-cut debate that is preoccupying Washington. But rather than bring light to the discussion, he revealed the darkness that lives in the hearts of Democratic and progressive left.

"The most important thing we have to do right now," Bernstein said on Fox News, "is hold the line for the tax cuts for the millionaires and billionaires who, frankly, do not need the extra cash."

Bernstein's claim is not self-evident. There is, however, a unsettling feel about it. The America envisioned by the founders and defended with life and blood is not the sort of nation in which the government dictates how much of their own money its citizens can keep.

Nevertheless, our ruling class magisterially insists that it has the right to determine how much cash some of us need.

We shouldn't be too hard on Bernstein, though. He's merely following the administration's lead.

Recall when President Obama himself said in April, "I do think at a certain point you've made enough money"?

And when he told Joe the Plumber, "When you spread the wealth around, it's good for everybody"?

That wasn't merely a slip made by a weary candidate on the campaign trail. It was confirmation of a statement he made seven years before he talked to Joe the Plumber. In a 2001 interview with Chicago public radio station WBEZ, Obama lamented the civil rights movement's failure to "put together the actual coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive change."

Maybe we shouldn't be too hard on Obama, either. The Democratic Party and its supporters have long been obsessed with wealth redistribution and shrinking what they believe to be high salaries.

These class-warfare fixations are so deeply ingrained that they refuse to acknowledge they violate the constitutional guarantee of equal treatment under the law — and exceed the bounds of any legitimate governing. They're political toxins in this Tea Party era.