The Marxist cat-fight in Toronto Centre

Terence Corcoran: Linda McQuaig and Chrystia Freeland stage Marxist battle in downtown Canada

On the left running for the NDP stands journalist Linda McQuaig, co-author of The Trouble With Billionaries, a book that plays to ancient leftist theories of alienation ... She prescribes tax rates of up to 70% and radical confiscation of the assets of the wealthy ...

Ms. McQuaig came out swinging Monday with a direct video challenge to her opponent, Liberal candidate Chrystia Freeland. “Hi Chrystia. It’s Linda McQuaig!”  says Ms. McQuaig in her best innocent-friendly trap-setting manner. “You’ve written a book on income inequality and I’ve written a book on income inequality.” But they are very different books, she says, with very different policy prescriptions.  So let’s have a debate, one on one, “any time, anywhere.”

Ms. Freeland’s book is Plutocrats:  The Rise of the New Global Super-rich and the Fall of Everyone Else.  The premise is false—everyone else has not fallen. ... To say that Plutocrats is “very different” from Ms. McQuaig’s The Trouble with Billionaires is somewhat misleading. ...  Both books are identical in their foundations, political tracts that popularize class warfare ... her analysis is no less Marxist in its origins.  She frequently quotes Karl Marx, the granddaddy of state socialism. Marx, she says, understood the dangers of a capitalist class ... 

... The poor voters of Toronto Centre are about to get a heavy dose of such crypto-Marxist revivalism. ...