(New York Post) – The right is dropping the ball when it comes to Thomas Piketty’s much heralded and totally flawed book on inequality, “Capital in the 21st Century.” This long and lugubrious opus is really an open sore, replete with so much absurdity that shooting it down should be like shooting fish in a barrel.
The left has embraced this rant against capitalism — and conservatives should be tying them to it, to expose where all the class-war rhetoric would really bring us.
Yet, with a few notable exceptions like The Post’s Kyle Smith, the right has kept silent.
Piketty, for instance, wants to spread the word that one of the most discredited economists in history, Karl Marx, was actually pretty much on point about who might win his predicted class struggle.
He also wants us to believe the French Revolution, with all its beheadings and all the chaos that wound up making Napoleon the country’s sole rule, was a more important uprising than the American Revolution because the froggies confiscated so much wealth along the way.
Then there’s Piketty’s gonzo “solution” to inequality: Impose a massive global wealth tax on anyone who makes more than $500,000 — even if that tax leads to a massive recession.
In other words, the world would be a better place if everyone was poor. In fact, Piketty also seems to like the fact that there was less income inequality during the Great Depression.
Oh, and you’d be happier if the United Nations replaced the IRS as your tax collector.
One more thing: He doesn’t think people have ever lost money speculating in the markets — ignoring or just plain ignorant of the fact that, e.g., plenty of rich people lost their shirts when Lehman Bros. and Bear Stearns collapsed during the 2008 financial crisis.
But most of the conservatives who aren’t ignoring this nonsense are pointing out how much great research Piketty did for his 700-page snoozer. And that’s when they’re not conceding that things are really bad for average people — without explaining the obvious: They’ve gotten even worse because we’ve been doing what Piketty prescribes.
Let’s be clear: Income inequality has existed forever — which Piketty sort of admits, but only in the most one-sided ways. For example, he makes it seem like things were just groovy during the 1970s — a time when hyperinflation and oil embargoes reigned and the US economy turned so far south that when Ronald Reagan came to town with his tax cuts, plenty of rank-and-file Democrats voted for them.
The fact is, these inequalities always level out when the economy gets growing vigorously. No one in his right mind thinks it was better being working-class during the 1970s than the 1980s — or that it’s better now for the average Joe than it was just a decade ago.
Come on: Income inequality has grown tremendously under President Obama — who’s basically followed the Piketty playbook, bashing business, imposing massive taxes, creating new entitlements.
The impact? An unemployment rate that’s gone down only because people keep dropping out of the workforce. Wages that have remained flat even as the economy has grown slowly — which means people are probably earning less when inflation (however mild) is taken into account.
But the rich are doing pretty fine. The stock market is zooming thanks to increased productivity (a/k/a lower wages and less people working) coupled with the Federal Reserve’s policy of keeping interest rates at near zero even as it buys the junk investments that would otherwise clog Wall Street’s books.
Piketty makes a great deal out of a notion that investment income — i.e., stock market gains — have been rising faster than GDP, thus the game is rigged against workers in favor of the fat cats.
But we’ve had that in spades during the Obama years; anyone with enough cash made easy money just buying stocks the minute the Fed began to lower interest rates and print money back in 2009. (In case you weren’t paying attention, the S&P has more than doubled in the past five years.)
But if you didn’t have enough money to put in the markets, you were stuck in a lower-paying job — if you were lucky enough to have one.
Maybe conservatives just think the best thing to do is ignore Piketty and his fellow worshippers. So far that isn’t working; the French author is destined to make millions as his book sales soar and he achieves rock-star status.
Meanwhile, both he and his bizarre theories gain currency because conservatives have ceded the intellectual debate to a Frenchman who just a few weeks ago couldn’t get a table at the Olive Garden.
How’s that for Capital in the 21st Century?
[H/T NewYorkPost: Charles Gasparino]
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