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Chopping Down the Tall Hops

In what has become an all-too-familiar tragedy, an American corporation is about to be penalized for being too successful. The Boston Beer Company is a "craft brewer" that produces delicious varieties of Sam Adams beer. The federal government imposes a lower excise tax per barrel on craft brewers -- those that produce fewer than 2 million barrels per year. Because of its business acumen and artisanal expertise, Boston Beer expects to exceed that output in 2012 -- and thereby be punished by a higher tax rate.

This, of course, is based on the egalitarian idea that those who are successful are just "lucky," and that the fruits of that "luck" must be redistributed to the "unlucky." (And if redistribution of values is impossible, then the "lucky" must be chopped down.) We can see this anti-human code all over the culture -- in the journalists who like to "afflict the comfortable," in the envious who sneer at achievement, in the education budgets that spend exorbitant sums to "norm" imbeciles into classrooms, in the use of antitrust laws to penalize our best corporations.

Historically, this vicious "Tall Poppy Syndrome" was noted by Aristotle and in Livy's History of Rome: "In Livy's account, the tyrannical Roman King, Tarquin the Proud, received a messenger from his son Sextus Tarquinius asking what he should do next in Gabii, since he had become all-powerful there. Rather than answering the messenger verbally, Tarquin went into his garden, took a stick, and symbolically swept it across his garden, thus cutting off the heads of the tallest poppies that were growing there. The messenger, tired of waiting for an answer, returned to Gabii and told Sextus what he had seen. Sextus realised that his father wished him to put to death all of the most eminent people of Gabii, which he then did." (Wikipedia)

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/09/us/09beer.html?scp=1&sq=small%20brewer&st=cse