In this episode, Rik from Planet Vulcan reviews the collaborative effort of Thomas Piketty and Michael Sandel to pitch their scheme of confiscatory taxation in their new book, in the name of the nebulous concept of equality, for the undefined and undefinable "common good", in order to counter the effects uneven luck distribution, the machinations of an imaginary malicious oligarchy, and perceived patterns of accidental historical processes. They back up their pitch with claims of piety - they are supposedly the heroes who will place limits on the evils that emerge from the operation of markets.
Rik demonstrates that neither man has even a weak grasp of how an economic system functions. To them, the "economy" is a black box, and they believe that it will continue to crank out goods and services even if their proposed interventions create perverse incentives, and interrupt the evolved and evolving feedback loops that make the whole system work, and the existence of which our heroes are unaware.
It is likewise clear that their proposed scheme could only be implemented by totalitarian government, in spite of the lip service they both pay to liberty and democratic government; and that the implementation of their scheme would make the poor, and everyone else, poorer, even in the doubtful case that it actually were to reduce the disparities they lament.
