My dear American friends, today I'm going to take apart the two most successful salesmen of economic snake oil of our time: Thomas Piketty and Gabriel Zucman.
If you read my last post, you know where this comes from. Gramsci told his heirs not to storm the palace but to capture the institutions: schools, universities, media, culture. I showed you how France became the laboratory. Today I want to show you the field where that strategy worked best of all. Economics.
Here's why. In physics, if your theory is wrong, the bridge falls down. In engineering, the rocket explodes. Reality grades your work. In the social sciences, reality grades slowly, and nobody loses their job when the prediction fails. You pick your data, you pick your assumptions, you build a model, and the conclusion you wanted at the start comes out at the end with a lot of equations attached. That's the perfect terrain for a war of position. You don't need to be right. You need to be cited.
Meet the two generals.
Thomas Piketty wrote Capital in the Twenty-First Century. It sold millions of copies and became the most celebrated economics book of the decade. Gabriel Zucman, his former student, wrote The Triumph of Injustice with Emmanuel Saez and helped design the wealth taxes that Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders campaigned on. This is not a French problem. Their ideas are already inside your Democratic Party.
Now let's go through their theses one by one.
Thesis one: "r > g." Piketty's famous formula says the return on capital grows faster than the economy, so wealth inevitably concentrates in the hands of a few dynasties, and capitalism slides back to the aristocracy of the 19th century.
Look at the list of the richest Americans today. Elon Musk. Jeff Bezos. Jensen Huang. Mark Zuckerberg. Larry Page. First-generation builders. Not heirs. Most of the names on the first Forbes 400 list in 1982 have since fallen off it. Fortunes don't compound forever. They get split between children, spent, mismanaged, and overtaken by people who build something new. And when an MIT graduate student, Matthew Rognlie, looked closely at Piketty's own numbers, he found that the rise in capital's share of income came almost entirely from housing. Not factories. Not shareholders. Real estate, which is a story about building restrictions, not about capitalism. The law of history turned out to be a law of zoning.
Thesis two: "Inequality in America has exploded." Piketty, Saez and Zucman built the charts every journalist uses. Top 1% capturing everything, the middle class crushed.
Then two economists at the US Treasury and the Joint Committee on Taxation, Gerald Auten and David Splinter, redid the work. They counted what the famous charts left out or treated differently: taxes paid, government transfers, retirement income, changes in how people file. Their result: after taxes and transfers, the top 1%'s share of income has barely moved since the 1960s. Same country, same tax data, a completely different story. The difference isn't reality. It's the assumptions. And Piketty's data was already in trouble in 2014, when the Financial Times published an investigation pointing out errors and unexplained adjustments in his spreadsheets.
Thesis three: "Billionaires pay a lower tax rate than the working class." This was the headline of Saez and Zucman's book, and it went viral. The 400 richest Americans supposedly paid less than the bottom half.
To get there, they made choices that critics across the spectrum, including Larry Summers, Obama's own former Treasury Secretary, challenged: how corporate taxes are assigned, how refundable credits that put money into lower-income households' pockets are counted. Meanwhile, the IRS's own numbers say the top 1% of earners pay more than 40% of all federal income taxes. A viral claim is not a fact. It's a campaign slogan with footnotes.
Thesis four: "A small wealth tax on the ultra-rich will fund everything." In France, Zucman's proposal became the left's flagship measure: a 2% minimum tax every year on fortunes over €100 million.
Here's what they never explain. The fortunes of builders are not piles of cash. They are shares in the companies they built. Imagine a founder whose startup is valued at a billion euros but doesn't make a profit yet. To pay a 2% tax on paper wealth, every year, he has to sell pieces of his company. Year after year, he loses control, and the buyers are usually foreign funds. Congratulations, you just exported your best companies.
And we know what happens next, because it already happened. In 1990, twelve OECD countries had a wealth tax. By 2017, only four did. Nearly all of them repealed it, because it raised little and chased away capital. Norway raised its wealth tax in 2022 and dozens of its richest people moved to Switzerland. France ran the experiment for decades before abolishing most of its wealth tax in 2018. Their policy has been tested. It failed every time.
Thesis five: and here they stop pretending. In his next book, Capital and Ideology, Piketty proposes what he openly calls "participatory socialism." Taxes on the largest fortunes up to 90%. Property that is no longer permanent, but "temporary," returned to the collective at regular intervals. He's not hiding anything. The goal isn't to fix capitalism. It's to end private ownership of anything big enough to matter.
So why are they celebrated? Why do they have the prizes, the chairs, the front pages, the invitations to Davos? Zucman even won the John Bates Clark Medal in 2023, one of the most prestigious awards in economics.
That's not a refutation of what I'm telling you. That's the proof of it. That's what it looks like when Gramsci's long march reaches the economics departments. The institutions give each other medals, the media quote the medals, and the politicians quote the media. Nobody ever checks whether the predictions came true.
So stop calling them neutral economists. They are activists with PhDs. Their work starts from a conclusion, that private wealth is illegitimate, and builds the data to justify it.
And understand where that conclusion leads. I'm not saying Piketty or Zucman want camps. I'm saying every regime that tried to abolish large private property ended in poverty, and the worst of them ended in prisons and mass graves. The intellectuals who cheered Lenin didn't want gulags either. Many of them ended up in one. Good intentions have never been a firewall.
Next time someone quotes Piketty or Zucman at you, don't get angry. Ask questions. Who are the richest people today, heirs or builders? Why did almost every country that tried a wealth tax repeal it? Why do two teams using the same tax data reach opposite conclusions? What does Piketty mean by temporary property?
You don't need to win the argument. You just need to make them check.
I come from your future. We gave these men our universities, our newspapers and our budget debates. Don't give them yours.
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