Over the years, I have noticed a trend. For the record, I have no data to back it up. It’s personal observation. Self-made men and women often have a sense of where they come from and the contributions made by others to their success. As a result they are often generous. Conversely, the scions of wealth, growing up with a silver spoon, and groomed in the finest schools to fill top executive positions, are more focused on their on entitlement, more greedy, and more inclined to buy power. Remember the Thomas Piety. He took that idea and put meat on its bones.
“Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” the new book by the French economist Thomas Piketty, is a bona fide phenomenon. Other books on economics have been best sellers, but Mr. Piketty’s contribution is serious, discourse-changing scholarship in a way most best sellers aren’t. And conservatives are terrified. Thus James Pethokoukis of the American Enterprise Institute warns in National Review [wing-nuts delinked] that Mr. Piketty’s work must be refuted, because otherwise it “will spread among the clerisy and reshape the political economic landscape on which all future policy battles will be waged.”
Well, good luck with that. The really striking thing about the debate so far is that the right seems unable to mount any kind of substantive counterattack to Mr. Piketty’s thesis. Instead, the response has been all about name-calling — in particular, claims that Mr. Piketty is a Marxist, and so is anyone who considers inequality of income and wealth an important issue.
I’ll come back to the name-calling in a moment. First, let’s talk about why “Capital” is having such an impact.
Mr. Piketty is hardly the first economist to point out that we are experiencing a sharp rise in inequality, or even to emphasize the contrast between slow income growth for most of the population and soaring incomes at the top. It’s true that Mr. Piketty and his colleagues have added a great deal of historical depth to our knowledge, demonstrating that we really are living in a new Gilded Age. But we’ve known that for a while.
No, what’s really new about “Capital” is the way it demolishes that most cherished of conservative myths, the insistence that we’re living in a meritocracy in which great wealth is earned and deserved… [emphasis added]
Inserted from <NY Times>
Click through for the rest of this fine Krugman article. It makes sense of why everything the Republican Party does always relates to one of two goals. The first is to transfer even more wealth from the poor and middle classes to billionaires. The second is to establish a permanent Republican Regime, a totalitarian fascist plutocracy in which elections exist only for show.
Our voices must speak louder than their money, before it’s too late.
In a fractured decision that revealed deep divisions over what role the judiciary should play in protecting racial and ethnic minorities, the Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld a Michigan constitutional amendment that bans affirmative action in admissions to the state’s public universities.
The American middle class, long the most affluent in the world, has lost that distinction.
