Chris Hughes, one of the men who founded Facebook in a Harvard University dorm room, has a new book out, though I’ll decline to advertise it here. He can ask Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to do that for him. There are four major ideas being advanced within the tome, and three of those ideas are simply wrong. The one that’s right, a universal basic income (with emphasis on “basic”), is just fine, we’ve only got to work out a way to pay for it. The other three, however, warrant criticism.

The first of these bad ideas is that top tax rates should increase to 50 percent. This won’t work because of that pesky Laffer Curve. It’s pretty obvious there’s a tax rate above which revenue collected falls — a 130 percent rate (something we had for one year in my native Britain) collects very little in the second year of the experiment. The argument is only over what that rate is.