There are many laughable aspects to the Adam Schiff impeachment circus including the utter lack of substantial evidence. But what’s not funny is the basis for impeachment, which is a complete bastardization of one of the foundational principles of Western civilization: property rights.

Democrats are saying that withholding US foreign aid until a foreign country does something is extortion. Nevermind that Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders did the exact same thing with regard to withholding funds from Israel until they did their bidding or that Joe Biden did the same in Ukraine!

What Schiff and the impeachment Democrats are saying is that foreign aid is, by right, owned by the foreign entity—that US taxpayer money is actually the Ukraine government’s money and Trump stole it from the Ukraine until they did what he said.

This is rooted in the socialist belief that taxpayer money isn’t rightfully the taxpayer’s—it belongs to the government and by extension whoever the government is going to give that money to. Your property isn’t yours, it’s that poor guy’s down the street. Your money isn’t yours, it belongs to the Ukraine.

But that’s not how this works. That’s not how any of this works. It’s completely backwards and contrary to the concept of property rights, which made America great in the first place. If you worked to earn money, that money is yours. And if you want to give money to a charity, great. If you don’t want to give money to a charity, you’re not stealing from them. If I say, “I’m not going to give any money to a specific charity until they produce a legitimate balance sheet,” that’s not extortion.

Taxation, on the other hand, is the taking of money by force against the will of the rightful owner. Taxation is theft. Taxation is extortion.

But now you have Democrats claiming that Trump is guilty of extortion by not taking money from Americans against their will and giving it to a foreign country for 55 days. They’re claiming that not extortion is extortion. A is not A.

As Orwell wrote in 1984, “In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense.”

The real crime isn’t what government did or didn’t do with the money, it’s how government got the money in the first place. Every government official who votes to take money from people against their will should be on trial. Everything else in the impeachment burlesque is a rainbow-colored smokescreen to cover this insidious fact.