French economist Thomas Piketty recently accomplished something practitioners of the “dismal science” can only dream of: He became a celebrity. His tome, “Capital in the Twenty-first Century” was hailed as “a watershed in economic thinking,” “a sweeping account of rising inequality,” and a book that could “change the way we think about the past two centuries of economic thought.” The book has been catnip for fans of taxing the rich and the redistributing the proceeds to the less fortunate.

Piketty predicts the return to a “patrimonial society” in which a few plutocrats live in luxury on inherited wealth while the rest struggle to survive — unless drastic measures are taken. His admitted ideological bias against capitalism suggests that his thesis was predetermined and that his facts were cherry-picked to support the thesis. An economic argument that was supported by reference to Jane Austin and Honore de Balzac ought to have raised skepticism. And since the book was published, serious challenges have been raised concerning Piketty’s numbers. But when have facts ever gotten in the way of ideology?

Capitalism is an irresistible target for demonization, but it’s a vague word with lots of variables. What we have in the United States can hardly be called capitalism.

Government and business are in bed together. The free market is compromised by tax loopholes and subsidies. Regulatory agencies reward favored businesses and punish others. Crony capitalism is the name of the game.

According to Piketty, modern capitalism almost inexorably leads to inequality. But inequality has been around since the beginning of time. Even communism created an affluent elite. Income inequality is also a cyclical phenomenon. The most pertinent factors in recent times have been revolutionary technological change and the increase of the global work force by as many as 2 billion new participants. Technology has rendered many jobs obsolete. Start-ups routinely create vast wealth with only a handful of highly-educated employees. Globalization inevitably causes downward pressure on incomes in developed countries as third world workers catch up.

Critics point out that Piketty has little to say about government policies and regulations that contribute to inequality and economic stagnation — or of the private sector’s ability to create jobs and raise standards of living. Moreover, as one economist argues, “The past 25 years have witnessed the greatest reduction in global poverty in the history of the world … World-wide income inequality … is falling, not rising. … The credit goes to the spread of capitalism.”

Piketty’s solution to inequality — no surprise — is a global tax on wealth. But how much of such taxation ever winds up in the hands of the needy and how much actually goes to feeding the bureaucracy? Never mind. By all means, let’s tax the rich. After all, they got rich not by virtue of hard work and talent but by taking more than their share — right? Let’s just add a proviso requiring government to match every new dollar of tax on the rich with a dollar’s cut in spending. Government is notoriously wasteful and inefficient. Its economic meddling is always corrupted by political considerations. So, along with money confiscated from the rich let’s pluck some from the government. If we redistributed those funds, everyone in America would be rich.