Jonathan Swift is mostly remembered for “Gulliver’s Travels,” which is sometimes told as a children’s story and more rarely recognized for the political satire it was. But Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” doesn’t even try to be child-friendly; its satire is sharp and merciless.

“A Modest Proposal” is clearly the model for a new essay by the Heritage Foundation’s David Azerrad, who writes that to solve income inequality, all we need to do is kick out the wealthy.

“Round up all 136,080 taxpayers who make more than $2.16 million a year and ship ’em off to whatever country will accept them,” Azerrad said. “Presto. Problem solved. We’d still, of course, have inequality in America. But we’d at least have brought it back to the healthy 1960s’ levels that Paul Krugman and Elizabeth Warren nostalgically pine for. The 0.1 percenters, whose growing incomes have been fueling the rise in inequality over the past several decades, will have vanished overnight.”

He’s not serious, of course. He’s making a point, just as Swift was. In Swift’s day, the British were worried about the “Irish question” — what was perceived to be the intransigent poverty and poor life choices made by the Irish. He wrote sympathetically about the starving beggars in Dublin streets. Readers weren’t ready for that modest proposal:

“A young healthy child well-nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee, or a ragout,” he wrote. And later, “I grant this food will be somewhat dear, and therefore very proper for landlords, who, as they have already devoured most of the parents, seem to have the best title to the children.”

The point Swift was making was not lost on his British readers; the mercantilist view of economics, prevalent at the time, viewed people as commodities. Heavy government control of production and trade, along with oppressive import and export restrictions, led to an economy based on shifting wealth from colonies (in the form of resources and cheap labor) to the merchant class. In modern economic thinking, Adam Smith rejected mercantilism, while John Maynard Keynes argued for a socialist-lite version of what he called “new mercantilism.”

Swift’s point was that people are more than commodities. Likewise, Azerrad’s point is that people are more than mere income brackets. If “income equality” is truly a worthy goal in and of itself, then lopping off the top end would do the trick.

“This proposal will surely strike many as extreme,” he writes. “But drastic times call for drastic measures. President Obama, after all, has called growing inequality ‘the defining challenge of our time.'”

There will be a downside. Members of the awful “1 percent” happen to be the venture capitalists and high-end consumers that drive much of our economy. Other countries will want them, so he suggests “auctioning off the top-earning Americans to the highest foreign bidder.”

The Swiftian satire works because the income inequality argument is flawed. Those 1 percenters are people, too.