Acceptable Versus Unacceptable Wealth Creation: How to escape today's populist dilemma.

• Author: Connolly, Bernard

The gilets jaunes protests in France and French President Emmanuel Macron's response to them before caving in unsurprisingly brought forth comparisons with Marie Antoinette. The French president is laughably described in much political commentary as a centrist--as if Left vs. Right were the key political struggle.

For now, it is not, although it could quickly re-emerge out of the titanic battle between hyper-extremist advocates, such as Macron, of global "governance"--a global dictatorship of the nomenklatura--and ordinary people which must be fought. The elites really are behaving like the Bourbons and the Romanovs. But they seem to have learned one lesson: their rule is less vulnerable to revolution if it is global in coverage. National sovereignty is essential for democracy, and that is why the nomenklatura, or at least its European chapters, is so determined to extinguish it.

How can one try to ensure that the conflict between the nomenklatura and the hoi polloi is not exploited by the extreme Left? First, and most obviously, the hoi polloi must be supported against the nomenklatura by genuine liberals. That is happening in Britain, where the true liberals are the Brexiteers. But the risk is that the incompetence and malevolence of Remainers in Britain have the end result of putting the Labour Party, the natural home of elitism, in power--and with a leadership fiercely opposed to political or economic liberalism.

In the wider world, a major part of the problem has been that the globalist nomenklatura is indelibly associated with the massive distortions of wealth apparent over the past twenty years or so. And that is a problem that has now come home to roost for that extremist champion of the nomenklatura: Emmanuel Macron.

Macron has reportedly been under pressure from his advisers to try to placate les gilets jaunes by restoring wealth taxes which had been removed in the hope of attracting wealthier members of the nomenklatura, bankers in particular, to set up shop in France. He has so far resisted that pressure. But in France as elsewhere, there is a very widespread belief that the distribution of wealth has become so unequal that it is now unacceptable.

Yet the accumulation of wealth has traditionally and correctly been seen as the wellspring of capitalism, and thus of progress and of rising living standards for the masses as well as for the wealth creators. Wealth taxes which watered down the incentive to create wealth would, as...