In the WSJ, Alysia Finley accuses President Trump of disappointing the liberal media in nominating Kevin Warsh as the next Fed chairman.

Even reporters at the New York Times couldn’t pigeonhole him as a Trump toady and acknowledged through gritted teeth that he is well-respected in financial markets.

With the Justice Department’s release of millions of documents from the Jeffrey Epstein files, the good news of such a respected new leader was quickly blotted out.

The documents include embarrassing details about the dead sex offender’s liaisons with the rich and powerful. Yet why has Epstein become such a political preoccupation?

Do the multitudes derive pleasure from observing the wealthy dragged through the mud?

This voyeurism may stem from the unequal economic times. A boom in asset prices has enriched the wealthy, while inflation has eroded wages. The result is resentment toward elites and efforts by the political class to sate their anger.

Bring Back the Gilded Age

Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s CEO, rolled an essay into 38 pages to say that today’s wealthy aren’t much different from the late 19th-century Gilded Age.

The share of wealth held by the top 1% of U.S. households hit a record high last year. Market exuberance over artificial intelligence, lubricated by ample financial liquidity, keeps propelling the stock market to new heights.

By wealth, the top 1% posses nearly as much as the bottom 90% (about $55 trillion).

As long as the rich aren’t the only ones getting ahead, growing wealth inequity per se isn’t really a problem, continues Ms. Finley,, before delving into the problem.

But over the past five years, the typical worker’s inflation-adjusted earnings have been flat. His real take-home pay, after taxes and other deductions, has fallen.

This has resulted in plunging household savings rates. Increasing numbers of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, as their affluent neighbors–having benefited from the tremendous advance in stock prices–spend without restraint.

This “wealth effect” is fueling consumer spending, but also class warfare and support for counterproductive policies.

Ms. Finley suggests readers look no further than Zohran Mamdani’s election or the Trump administration’s attempt to ban institutional investors from buying homes as examples of policies that will harm Americans they are meant to help.

Mr. Amodei says AI will magnify wealth disparities and cause massive unemployment. His solution: Soak the rich and spread their wealth around. This, too, is counterproductive.

According to Mr. Amodei, progressive taxation is the natural response to an enormous economic pie coupled with high inequality (a lack of quality jobs or, for many, poorly paid jobs).

“I can also make a pragmatic argument to the world’s billionaires that it’s in their interest to support a good version of it: if they don’t support a good version, they’ll inevitably get a bad version designed by a mob,” writes Mr. Amodei.

Has appeasing the mob worked in Amodei’s home state of California? Ms. Finley reminds readers that California’s heavily progressive tax system has raised enormous revenue for spendthrift politicians to spread around. What it hasn’t done is satisfy trial lawyers, unions, and left-wing activists.

What it has done is fuel a flight of high earners and businesses that create jobs. Now unions are pushing a wealth tax.

The information sector has accounted for more than half of California’s economic growth since early 2022. Nearly every industry besides healthcare, social assistance and government has lost jobs—and not because of AI. High taxes and paternalistic policies—e.g., the state’s $20-an-hour minimum wage for fast-food workers and climate mandates—are killing them.

California has the highest jobless rate in the country, not because of AI, but because of damaging economic policies, writes Ms. Finley.

Too often, policies to reduce economic disparities leave the multitude worse off.

Exhibit B is the Federal Reserve’s lax monetary policy during the pandemic.

The Fed kept benchmark interest rates near zero and increased its balance sheet by some $4.8 trillion by buying government debt and mortgage-backed securities. That suppressed mortgage rates and government borrowing costs for a time while driving investors into higher-yielding assets. Stocks and housing prices boomed, but so did inflation.

Former Chairman Jerome Powell justified keeping monetary conditions easy to achieve “inclusive growth”—that is, to reduce socioeconomic disparities.

The Fed didn’t begin raising interest rates until the spring of 2022 and started to reduce its balance sheet only that summer.

The result: inflation that outpaced wages and left Americans reeling.

Which is why Kevin Warsh’s appointment is good news. He has long been critical of the Fed’s political mission creep. Mr. Warsh seems to understand that stable prices are a prerequisite for broad-based prosperity.

Notably, writes Ms. Finley, during Mr. Trump’s first term until the pandemic, inflation-adjusted wages increased, and the economy boomed as the Fed shrank its balance sheet. Stable prices, tax cuts, and deregulation proved a successful recipe—and could be again.

The biggest danger to American workers isn’t AI but a mob in Washington out to tear down the wealthy.