Wednesday, December 31, 2014

An Answer to Thomas Piketty

By Thomas DiLorenzo

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.”

The above originally appeared at LewRockwell.com.

3 comments:

  1. Picketty should be listed in a book called, "World's Biggest Losers of the 21st Century".

    How can anyone possibly be so stupid as to support a sick ideology that murdered over 150 million people in the last century and on top of that left so many more in absolute poverty and misery?

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    1. I've come to the conclusion, the opinion that people in general think on emotional basis in the moment. This causes them to be emotionally manipulated and not connect the poverty, misery, and violence with the ideologies they support. Worse yet they are further conditioned into this way of thinking by schools, media, and so on.

      So when an ideology of the state brings misery, poverty, and violence they cannot think of anything but if they just had the right people doing the right things they could have the utopia they were sold on. Additionally to not call for more of the same they would have to admit to themselves they were wrong, that they were duped, and they can't do that. So more of the same it is.

      Play this game correctly, sell the populace on the scam, be that expert, and well you too can have a very nice life like Krugman and the rest. Not much has changed in thousands years.

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  2. "Flooding the world with more and more entreprenurial capitalists..." Isn't that the objective of Mark Cuban's Shark Tank? In fact that's what all investors tend to do and there are several TV shows based on this. From real estate development to restaurant operations to small business turnarounds these topics seem to be the new TV show growth model. A positive trend which hopefully will continue to grow in the new year.

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