Sergey Brin knows the evil of socialism — and he’s decided to stop it from coming to California.

The Google co-founder issued a rare statement this week slamming the left’s “billionaire tax” — to which Gov. Gavin Newsom has only offered the weakest opposition.

“I fled socialism with my family in 1979 and know the devastating, oppressive society it created in the Soviet Union,” Brin said. “I don’t want California to end up in the same place.”

He’s right — because that’s exactly where the “billionaire tax” is taking us. 

The left wing of the Democratic Party — which is particularly strong in California — is excited about the tax, and the prospect of seizing 5% of the wealth of the richest people in the state. 

It’s just the billionaires, they say — those who have benefited the most from the system, including everything the government has provided them, from roads to running water.

But that’s just where it starts. Socialism never stops with the most obvious targets. It always expands. 

Critics of the billionaire tax argue, convincingly, that the language of the proposal allows politicians to change the plan, and tax the wealth of the middle class. 

They’ll have to, because there isn’t enough wealth in the hands of billionaires to fill the bottomless pit of public health care spending in California, especially after Newsom expanded it to millions of illegal aliens. 

Brin is correct to speak out — and the only question is why he didn’t do so earlier.

California’s billionaires have courted the Democratic Party for decades. They partied with Barack Obama and spent lavishly on his policy priorities, such as immigration reform.

Google suppressed conservative news, and held a “cry-in” after Trump won in 2016. It was on board with the left’s “woke” agenda, including DEI and all sorts of political correctness.

Perhaps Brin and his fellow billionaires thought they could protect themselves by joining the left in targeting its political enemies.

But now they are the ones being pursued.

They are trying to rally opposition to the “billionaire tax.” As they do so, they may realize that many of the voters who might have helped them have left the state — chased out by costs, taxes, and regulations Democrats imposed while billionaires looked the other way.

Brin is welcome to the fight. But he needs to be in it for the long haul. Turning the state around will take more than one election.

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