An Interesting Experiment

There is an experiment whose outcome I'd love to know: whether, over the long-run, a horse offered a carrot at the end of a stick will perform better than a horse that is whipped.  Intuition tells me the former is true in the long-run while the latter may be true for only brief spurts.
There is of course the metaphor here to society and economics.  The metaphor I thought was one that was settled in experimentation.  I thought it was proved that communism doesn't work because society's workers do not perform well when offered a whip, or at best a meager carrot.  Output falls and other means for sustaining society must be found.  Of course the fall of the Soviet empire isn't the only example, it is just the most recent.
So if history is replete with examples of undermotivated workers not performing well, why then is the Democrat majority of the United States bent on establishing a system that punishes the best performing workers in the country and returning to the rest mediocre benefits?  There are only two possible answers.  One, the hubris of the Democrat leaders is such that they feel they can be the ones to make it work.  By the force of their personality they can change fundamental societal behavior and charm their way to success. 
The other possibility is they are experimenting, as academicians are wont to do.  The problem is that they are experimenting with livlihoods, not computer models.  Every engineer is taught that any computer model must be checked for reasonableness and reality.  After running a computer model a small scale test is performed and the model is altered based on reality.  This continues until reality and the model converge and then the experiment can be placed into production.  Democrat leadership seems perfectly willing to bypass, really ignore, small scale testing and jump straight into production.
The largest states that have tried some of the schemes being suggested have shown the model to be a failure. 
Raising income taxes on the hardest working simply means the hardest working find somewhere else to work.  Raising INCOME taxes at a national level will simply mean the richest will shift their money to a different stream.  Rather than accept salary as income, they can shift it to capital gains via stock, or some other accounting trick.  Society's richest have proven time and again willing to pay their "fair share", but not the entire share.  Pretty soon the bill for "health care reform" will come due and it will fall to subsequent generations to pay for it.
Those that voted for change, you will be sorely disappointed in the change that is emminent.  The promises that change would be free to the masses will prove to be hyperbole, if not outright lies.  We cannot outrun history, and it would be better if we didn't repeat the worst parts of it.