If America is foolish enough to follow Piketty’s advice, which is based purely on class warfare and envy, we may very well recreate the 1970s economic results all over again.

The Robin Hood Fallacy: 

Piketty Would Take from the Rich

 to Give to the Poor

by Stephen Moore

In public policy, bad ideas—no matter how many times they have been discredited—never completely go away. They seem to pop up over and over. Enter the hot new book that has captured the imagination and attention of the left because it endorses an 80 percent tax rate on the rich in the name of “leveling” incomes.

The book is entitled “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” by French economist Thomas Piketty, and in addition to 1970s-style tax rates, he wants a new wealth tax on the rich and more money for social welfare programs. He’s being treated like the modern-day Adam Smith by the media.

The way to create a more equal distribution of income, apparently, is by making everyone poorer.

Piketty warns that “meritocratic extremism”—which is another way of saying you get to keep the fruits of your labor—is ruining our nation’s economy and if we don’t divide the pie more equally, the result could be “truly frightening.” He says that his goal is to “save capitalism,” which sounds much like the logic of President George W. Bush circa 2008 during the height of the financial crisis: We need to suspend the free enterprise system in order to save it.

Piketty insists he has 200 years of evidence to show that tax rates can and should go much higher on the rich, but he must not be counting the most recent 50 years, because this has been an era that has proven time and again that high tax rates can destroy an economy.

If tax rates didn’t matter, as Piketty conjectures, then it would be hard to explain why Florida and Texas—states with no state income tax—have gained four times the number of jobs over the last 20 years as the two states with the highest rates, California and New York (with rates close 13 percent). If overspending and high tax rates create a workers’ paradise, why have American workers left these two states in such a steady stream?

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