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

The operative line in "Wall Street" was not "Greed is good" but "Do you
think we live in a democracy?"

--
Myth, after all, is what we believe naturally. History is what we must
painfully learn and struggle to remember. -Albert Goldman