I'm always afraid when a supposedly enlightened thinker like Thomas Piketty suggests he knows better and proposes to empower the state and its cadre of mission-driven experts to define and enforce what constitutes the collective interest over the messy, subjective choices of free individuals. This paternalistic hubris ignores the Hayekian knowledge problem: no central authority, no matter how credentialed or well-intentioned, can aggregate the dispersed, local information that markets and personal decisions reveal far more efficiently. History is littered with the corpses of such experiments. The Jacobins during the French Revolution proclaimed themselves guardians of the bien public, only for Robespierre’s Committee of Public Safety to unleash the Reign of Terror, executing tens of thousands in the name of virtue and equality. In the Soviet Union, Lenin and Stalin’s five-year plans dictated production “for the common good of the proletariat,” producing engineered famines like the Holodomor that starved millions while bureaucratic diktats crushed innovation. Mao’s Great Leap Forward in China similarly mobilized the masses under the banner of collective prosperity, resulting in the deadliest famine in human history because top-down edicts overrode farmers’ practical knowledge and incentives. Piketty’s vision, however cloaked in modern economic jargon, risks reviving the same fatal conceit: that an enlightened few can steer society toward utopia without repeating the authoritarian nightmares of the past.
