Jonathan Matthew Smucker

It’s not every day that I have the honor of being accused of writing “foolish things” by the “great tax reformer” Grover Norquist. After reading Kevin Drum’s account of Louisiana Republicans’ exacerbation with Norquist, I Tweeted my own exacerbation. To my surprise, Mr. Norquist took at least a few seconds to break from his busy agenda of bankrupting America to explain himself.

@jonathansmucker @MattBruenig @ebruenig @kdrum Simple. I don’t write foolish things like “we can do better than freedom” — Grover Norquist (@GroverNorquist) June 9, 2015

To whom was he referring? Who would say such a foolish thing, I wondered? “We can do better than freedom?” What an absurd argument to make! And then I suddenly realized that it was me! He was referring to my Twitter profile, which leads with the sentence “We can do better than capitalism.” Easy mistake to make. I gently corrected him.

.@GroverNorquist I wrote “We can do better than capitalism”—but I totally see how elites like you might get freedom and capitalism confused.

— Jonathan M Smucker (@jonathansmucker) June 9, 2015

Now, let’s tax the rich already. “Simple.”