Academic liberals are forever coming up with new reasons for government activism. Among the alleged problems that it needs to deal with is the fact that some Americans get exceedingly rich, apparently through good luck. In his recent book Success and Luck, Cornell University economics professor Robert Frank argues that the wealth of the super-rich is often due more to good fortune than their endeavors. And all that wealth has bad effects for the rest of the country. He wants to change our tax code to offset good luck — specifically by adopting a consumption tax.

I don’t think good luck is a problem and think that federal activism to deal with it would be counterproductive, as I explain in this Forbes article.

Complaining about luck is merely another excuse for redistributionism, essentially no different from Obama’s “you didn’t build that” trope.

America does have a problem with undue wealth, but it stems from governmental policies that allow the politically connected to line their pockets at the expense of the rest of us. Forget about “luck” and concentrate on cronyism.