Techno-left French rockstar economist Thomas Piketty is here to lecture Australians about the evils of rising income inequality and the "fairy tale" of a meritocracy perpetuated by a global capitalist elite. Professor Piketty's book, Capital in the 21st Century, claims to show that the return on capital – savings interest, dividends, rent and capital gains – are outpacing the rest of the economy and the returns to labour. His solution is a swingeing new tax on global capital. His thesis seeks to do what socialists have always done: empirically prove that socialism is not only morally right, but scientifically correct.

Regrettably, Mr Piketty seems to assume that the problems of Europe and North America apply to Australia. He is wrong. There will always be relatively rich people and relatively poor people. But Australia does not have some sort of inherited money plutocracy as Mr Piketty's France. It is there that a true elite of technocrats has applied such dirigiste laws, rules and high taxes that they have effectively regulated opportunity away for immigrants; Australia is a land of immigrant opportunity. Unlike France, Australia does not breed large ghettos of intergenerational poverty that are now rearing battalions of Islamist terrorists. A successful multicultural and socially mobile nation needs no lectures on how to become more … French.

Since 2000, there has been nearly a 75 per cent turnover on the the BRW Rich 200 now published in this newspaper. Unlike the global plutocracy Mr Piketty imagines, only one-in-seven or so of Australia's richest 200 millionaires and billionaires got their start from inherited money. Much the same applies to the BRW Young Rich list that will appear in Friday's The Australian Financial Review Magazine. That list includes Scott Stavretis, featured on page one today, who left school at 16 to start his own internet service provider and is now worth an estimated $46 million through his international call centre business. The 36-year-old Mr Stavretis takes his inspiration from his father who raised his family on his own while running a small business. Or 39-year-old Melbourne property developer Kosta Drakopoulos, who dropped out of his TAFE course and spent a few years packing boxes in warehouses before taking a $24,000 administration job at a family company where he learned about property valuation. Now he's worth an estimated $60 million.

Thomas Piketty being interviewed by Andrew Leigh Prudence Upton

Sure, only a relative handful can get to the top of the BRW rich lists. But, until a few years ago, any able bodied young Australian could earn $150,000 driving a truck or cooking in the Pilbara. Perhaps the most outrageous part of Mr Piketty's thesis is his claim that material inequality is on the rise, when globally, inequality has fallen over the past 30 years thanks to rise of Chinese, Indian, Indonesian and other emerging market middle class populations. True, some jobs in rich countries have been outsourced to those with lower labour costs, but the overall reduction of poverty since the end of the cold war has been one of global capitalism's great achievements.

This is yet another attempt to transfer the problems of slow-growth Europe and North America into Australia's frontier economy, feeding Labor's populist line that our problems can be solved by confiscating more from our wealth creators. So Labor's shadow assistant Treasurer Andrew Leigh appears on stage with Mr Piketty. Yet better-off Australians already pay the great bulk of taxes. And as economist Warwick McKibbin says in today's pages, while inequality may have risen slightly, "everybody had a share in the pie" over Australia's quarter of a century of uninterrupted economic growth. Our biggest problem is not inequality but that the price of our biggest exports have slumped. We need to fix this by closing our budget deficit, making our workplaces more high performing and through fair dinkum tax reform. If we make it easier for entrepeneurs to create wealth and prosperity, our opportunity society will do the rest.