While they’re calling it “reform,” as they usually do, Democrats in the General Assembly are lining up behind another plan to increase taxes and thereby help relieve Gov. Dannel P. Malloy of his campaign pledge last year not to do so.

The idea has been around for years — transferring to state government the municipal property tax on motor vehicles so that all vehicles are taxed at the same rate rather than at rates that vary wildly among municipalities. But municipalities would not necessarily recover the taxes collected on the cars domiciled within them. Instead state government would send the money back to municipalities on the basis of what it considered their need.

That is, money from municipalities with largely self-sufficient populations would be transferred to municipalities with largely dependent populations.

Predictably enough, the bill has been proposed by state Senate President Pro Tem Martin Looney, Democrat from ever-impoverished New Haven, while Sen. L. Scott Frantz, Republican from exclusive Greenwich, and Rep. Sam Belsito, Republican from almost-as-exclusive Tolland, denounce it as redistribution of wealth and socialism.

But of course all government is to some extent redistributive and socialistic, taking money from people through taxes and giving it to others, for good or ill. So unless the Republicans want social Darwinsim, their objection is silly, and sillier still because tax disparities like those arising from the property tax on cars are fairly questioned and because redistributing the car tax money will only make things worse.

The bigger issue here is how much autonomy and responsibility municipal government is to have. This issue has been addressed repeatedly for years in public education as state government has increased its subsidies to municipal school systems and has imposed more requirements on them in a somewhat misguided pursuit of equalizing educational opportunity, school spending having little effect on education, as educational results correlate mainly with parental involvement with children.

If it’s unfair for the same car to be taxed at different rates in different municipalities, it’s no fairer for similar residential or business properties to be taxed at different rates as well, especially since municipalities spend most of their property tax revenue on education, what with school systems supposed to be largely equal throughout the state, even though they never can be largely equal as long as their students are not.

If Connecticut really believed this equality stuff, it would have a single statewide property tax rate (if it had a property tax at all); state government, not municipal government, would run all public schools, as in Hawaii; all schools would have to have the same facilities and provide the same services, with no omissions or extras permitted; and municipal government would stick to local roads maintenance and senior citizen centers, at least until those things also were discovered to be constitutional rights.

But fairness is not what Looney’s legislation is really about.

Rather its objective is the same old Connecticut Democratic objective — simply to raise taxes in self-supporting middle- and upper-class towns, which have populations still somewhat capable of holding municipal government to account, disproportionately towns with Republican administrations, and to transfer the money to cities whose populations are impoverished, dependent on welfare stipends, and indifferent to civic responsibility. That is, to transfer the money to cities with Democratic administrations, laden with political patronage, incompetence, and corruption; cities that, like Hartford, can find tens of millions of dollars to build a minor-league baseball stadium but not to keep school buildings in ordinary repair; cities where policy for decades has been not to alleviate poverty but perpetuate it as a lucrative business for a sanctimonious elite.

That’s no “reform.” It’s the status quo.