An Answer to Thomas Piketty . . .

[redcliffsw]

I'm always amazed at how Marxist academics always — always — pretend to be taking the moral high road while associating themselves with the ideology of mass murder and the obliteration of human civilization that was responsible for the death of hundreds of millions during the last century.

The latest "hero" among academic Marxists is one Thomas Piketty, a French Marxist economist who has written what he considers to be an updated version of  Karl Marx's Das Kapital.  His book, Capital in the 21st Century, has drawn praise from leftist ideologues everywhere, especially his most fawning fan, Paul Krugman.

It's the same old story:  Isn't "inequality" horrible.  The state must steal from the productive class and give their money to the parasitic class (while paying economic advisors like Thomas Piketty and Jonathan Gruber  handsome consulting fees to "justify" it all).

In a nutshell, Thomas Piketty's book can be summarized by the following syllogism:  1).  Socialism has always and everywhere been a colossal disaster for humanity; 2) Just about everyone knows this; 3) therefore, we need more socialism.

Of course, the only real solution to Piketty's "problem" of capital earning higher returns on investment than labor is radical tax cutting, privatization, and deregulation of industry in order to create more economic freedom to become entrepreneurs and capitalists.  Flooding the world with more and more entreprenurial capitalists would eventually drive down the rate of return to capital, at which time we can count on a future Thomas Piketty to write a thousand-page book about that kind of "inequality."
-Thomas DiLorenzo

http://www.lewrockwell.com/lrc-blog/the-answer-to-thomas-piketty/