Cato Institute’s James Dorn laments in this post that Thomas Piketty “is concerned with equality of outcome, not equality under a rule of law safeguarding one’s unalienable rights to liberty and property.”

Dorn points out that while Piketty assumes that his big tax increases would help to equalize the gap between people who have lots of financial capital and those who have little, they would also impose a penalty on people who have invested in their particular human capital.

Dorn writes, “History has shown that individuals have a natural desire to improve themselves and that economic freedom — not the redistributive state — is the key to human progress.” Thomas Piketty is not the first intellectual to want to throw away that key.