On 28/04/2014 10:56, Hils wrote:
On 2014-04-28 10:45, Graeme Wall wrote:
From a summary of Piketty's work in today's Guardian: "those who have
family fortunes are the winners, and everyone else doesn't have much of
a shot of being wealthy unless they marry into or inherit money. [...]
No one else can ever catch up."

Lovely piece of selective quoting.

I'm happy for interested readers to read the sources and make their own
conclusions, but here's a snippet from Piketty himself:

“It’s very difficult to make a democratic system work when you have such
extreme inequality” in income, he said, “and such extreme inequality in
terms of political influence and the production of knowledge and
information. One of the big lessons of the 20th century is that we don’t
need 19th-century inequality to grow.” But that’s just where the
capitalist world is heading again, he concludes. [...]

He favors a progressive global tax on real wealth (minus debt), with the
proceeds not handed to inefficient governments but redistributed to
those with less capital. “We just want a way to share the tax burden
that is fair and practical,” he said." [1]

[1]
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/20/bu...karl-marx.html


You do have to realise he is primarily talking about the USA, though he
does expand to notionaly cover the "English Speaking World" That, in
itself, is something of a French construct as it should cover such major
economies as India and the Dominios. Also, to a lesser extent, African
and other Commonwealth countries. However the French regard it as
referring to the UK, USA and those bits of occupied Canada west of
Quebec. The more advanced may have heard of Australia.

--
Graeme Wall
This account not read, substitute trains for rail.
Railway Miscellany at http://www.greywall.demon.co.uk/rail