text: May 30, 2014 at 10:12am
  The opinion pages, economic journals, and liberal websites are atwitter (a-Twitter?) these days over French economist Thomas Piketty's "Capital in the Twenty-First Century." Left-wingers cite Piketty's statistics showing growing wealth inequality — though some have been challenged by the Financial Times — in support of Piketty's policy response: huge taxes on high incomes and accumulated wealth.
  There, they could stamp out fossil fuels in favor of renewables — and get all those overweight suburbanites out of their vulgar SUVs and into subways, and out of their ticky-tack subdivisions and into gleaming mid-20th century modern high-rises. (Actually, there is a great city like that: Moscow.)
  The only problem is that voters won't cooperate. They don't seem interested in centralized direction from the chattering classes. The protest votes around the world are mostly going not to redistributionist parties of the left, but to various anti-centralization parties of the right.
  Current polling points to Republican victories in the 2014 off-year elections, and Pew Research reports that 65 percent want the next president to follow policies different from Barack Obama's. Our Anglosphere cousins Britain, Canada, and Australia all have center-right governments.
  Then there are last week's European Union parliament elections. In Britain, the United Kingdom Independence party, which wants out of the EU and tougher limits on immigration, came in first, ahead of recently redistributionist Labour — the first time in 30 years the national opposition party wasn't first.
  The European fringe parties are not a united lot (UKIP won't caucus with Front National). They express attitudes specific to each nation and lack a common platform. What they have in common is distaste for nanny state liberalism imposed by unaccountable E.U. bureaucrats and executives.
  Europe and North America are not the only parts of the world rejecting Piketty politics. In the world's largest democracy, India, 554 million people voted and gave a resounding victory (and the first outright parliamentary majority in 30 years) to Narendra Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party.
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  Not all elections around the world go the same way, and sometimes voters just rotate politicians in office. Americans have twice elected a leftish president; and last year, New York City elected a leftist mayor.
  But over the last 40 years, Piketty's years of increasing economic inequality, the biggest electoral successes have been free-marketeers (Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan) and light-on-redistribution moderates (Tony Blair, Bill Clinton).
  But the lesson of recent history is that, even when the inequality increases in the economic marketplace, there's not much demand in the political marketplace for economic redistribution.COPYRIGHT 2014 THE WASHINGTON EXAMINERDISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COM