Piketty is a Marxist who has written a great deal on income distribution to promote income redistribution and other Marxist goals. He exhibits no knowledge of economics and economic theory except that implied by the construction of economic statistics. His proposed solutions are implicitly violent, destructive, and unable to achieve the desired results.
Thomas Piketty A Brief History of Equality Harvard University Press, 2022
Thomas Piketty’s Brief History is the fourth installment of his assault on economic inequality, following as it does the best-selling Capital in the Twenty-First Century and Capital and Ideology. The third, Time for Socialism: Dispatches from a World on Fire, 2016–2021, is just a collection of popular articles based on which the New York Times dubbed Piketty a “vaguely left-of-center” economist. This slim fourth volume from Harvard University Press calls for far-reaching socialist policies to establish economic equality. It is a siren song of communism: “economic justice” without any cost or noteworthy harm to society.
The primary reason for my concern with Piketty and this book is the relative influence of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto (written with Frederick Engels) versus his Kapital: A Critique of Political Economy. The Manifesto was short, on point, and politically actionable while Kapital was long, jargony, filled with footnotes, and nebulous concerning political action. Indeed, Marx’s view of history told Kapital readers to sit tight for generations and suffer, while the Manifesto was an immediate call to arms around the world!
In terms of relevance, the Manifesto’s ten-point program would become the political action platform for democratic socialists worldwide and public policy in leading nations by 1917. In contrast, the highly improbable Marxist takeover of Russia had no blueprint from Kapital, led to one economic disaster after another, and ended in failure, as Ludwig von Mises predicted. Piketty may have at least learned that lesson and advocates a social-democratic-type takeover.
All of Piketty’s books are terrible from an economic perspective. Most importantly, all are as dangerous to political economy as Marx’s books were catastrophic to hundreds of millions of people, especially the lower-income people Marx and Piketty propose to help. The brevity of this book makes it potentially the most socially devastating of the four.
Brief History
Up until two centuries ago, more than 95 percent of humanity lived in “extreme poverty.” That number had fallen to about one-third of the global population by the end of the 1980s and is now less than 10 percent, and still falling, all during a period of rapid population increase. This is one of the most important facts you can say about the entire history of humanity, and yet it seems not widely known—and how it was achieved is completely lost on Piketty.
Piketty gives no indication to me that he is an economist or any kind of disinterested objective scientific observer. However, his statistic- and chart-filled books give the impression of a scientific basis for his policy conclusion. Piketty is a Marxist, an advocate for communism, but all in the guise of a conventional democratic socialism. However, his dedication of the book reminds readers of the Manifesto’s finale.
He does admit that the last quarter millennium has also been a powerful movement toward greater economic equality, but he largely ignores how the enormous, sustained increase in the standard of living was achieved. It just happened. He does want readers to understand his views that this improvement was not the result of capitalism, that sociopolitical systems are just a matter of democratic choice, and that various forms of socialist and union agitation are to be credited with economic progress.
The higher costs and lower benefits to becoming informed lead most voters to have less information about political decisions than about their market decisions, particularly crucial swing voters, who are often among the least informed in the electorate. That further raises the payoff to negative campaigning, especially the use of misleading part-truths. They are simple, but reality is complex and therefore is much harder to “sell” to voters paying limited attention.
Why is politics so negative compared to marketing — its analog in the private sector — even though virtually every candidate echoes the desire to “just get along”? The explanation revolves around two important ways political competition differs from market competition: higher payoffs to negative attacks, and rationally ignorant “customers.”
Selling your product in the private sector requires a customer to cast an affirmative vote to buy it. Just convincing a potential customer that a rival product should not be purchased does not mean a sale for you.
This is because a sales prospect can choose from among several sellers, or he can choose to not buy at all. But those options are unavailable in an election with only two major parties, where customers are effectively forced to “buy” from one of them.
In an essentially two-party election, convincing an uncommitted voter to vote against the “other guy” by tearing the opponent’s position down is as valuable to a candidate as convincing that voter of positive reasons to vote for him; either brings him a vote closer to a majority. That is not true in the private sector, as only votes for you — purchases — help you.
Similarly, talking a voter committed to a rival to switch to your side is worth two votes, since it adds one to your vote column and subtracts one from your rival’s. But you would only benefit from the single additional purchase/vote for you in the private sector. Further, in an election, finding a way to get someone who would have voted for your rival to not vote at all is as valuable as getting one more voter to vote for you.
This is why negative campaigns that turn voters off from political participation altogether are acceptable in politics, as long as a candidate thinks he will keep more of his competitor’s voters away from the polls than he will his own. In the private sector, such an approach would not be taken, as it would reduce, rather than increase, sales.
Why do I then say that the greatest danger to our lifetime is the misunderstanding of the meaning of Capitalism and Socialism? It is because the public at large thinks we are operating in a free market capitalism and all the ills of the world are because of this system.
I read EconomicPolicy Journal on a daily basis. I have never much had the desire to write to you mainly because the probability of you reading my correspondence is low. But here it goes.
From my perspective the biggest danger of our times is the basic misunderstanding of the meaning capitalism and socialism. In the classic sense it is very easy as Capitalism is the ownership of the means of production by the private individual and socialism is the ownership of the means of production by the collective (aka the government). But capitalism and socialism do not mean this anymore. Just ask any one of the talking heads on Bloomberg or CNBC or just the regular person on the street, the answer will be that we either live in a capitalistic system or once in a while they will say a mixed economy. If you asked these same people to define socialism and the answers are all over the place. I would also add if you asked people if capitalism equates to free market system the answers will also be very vague. In addition, I am not sure the general public at large realizes that the United States does not operate in a capitalistic system. If you asked me what kind of a system we live in I would say it is the economic system of Fascism. My argument has been that although Moussilni lost the physical war, he won the ideological war of economic systems.
As a student of Mises, Hayek, Rothbard and Hoppe, I can have a very clear definition of socialism is and what capitalism is but vast majority of the population cannot. In fact, socialism does not mean socialism in the classic sense anymore. Even the AOC and Sanders crowd has a very hard time defining what Democratic Socialism is and especially the economic system of Democratic Socialism. I would urge you to do a show with a Democratic Socialist and ask them to specifically define the economic policy of Democratic Socialism. I will venture to bet that the answers will be all over the place from a form of syndicalism to fascism (the economic system as described by Rockwell and Flynn) and almost always give you an answer of “The Nordic System”. I would even venture to bet that if you asked AOC if government should own all the means of production that she will say no, that is not what Democratic Socialism is about. She will then ramble on what capitalism and socialism mean without making much coherent sense (there are plenty of Youtube videos of this).
Why do I then say that the greatest danger to our lifetime is the misunderstanding of the meaning of Capitalism and Socialism? It is because the public at large thinks we are operating in a free market capitalism and all the ills of the world are because of this system. Once you have identified this, the next thing would be to change the system to some kind of a socialist system (whatever that means now). The danger comes in that as we move the spectrum more and more towards socialism the outcome at the least will be to lower the standard of living of the population. This becomes a vicious circle because the answer will always be to have more socialism until at some point in time the economic system becomes very close to socialism (I say very close because I think full socialism is unattainable). As a person that was born in the Soviet Union and migrated to the United States, I hope my time on earth has come to an end from old age before this transition occurs.
I would love for you maybe to expand on this and maybe to a podcast on the topic. As for me? I am very pessimistic about the direction that we are headed as a society.
First, I do read all the emails that come to me. That said, it would be impossible to reply to all of them at length though.
As for the body of your comment, you do make a number of important points.
I would add though that it is not important for the masses to get into the intricacies of the differences between, say, socialism and fascism. That is why I tend to frame the problem in terms of freedom versus central planning. This is a very easy concept to understand and makes it easy for individuals to understand what fits in the central planning category and what fits in the freedom category.
As for the term capitalism, I will use it occasionally but I will differentiate it from crony capitalism. I prefer using the term free-market economy or when discussing things in a broader context the Private Property Society.
The goal is not to turn the masses into scholars on the nuances between, for example, Fascism and the Soviet communist state but rather to get the simple concept across that every economic and societal structure boils down to either individual freedom or central planning within the context of private property or government-controlled property.
The Democrats have, once again, offered us their preselected corporate candidates. We can vote for a candidate who serves oligarchic power, albeit with more decorum than Trump, or we can see Trump shoved down our throats. That is the choice. It exposes the least worst option as a con, a mechanism used repeatedly to buttress corporate power. The elites know they would be safe in the hands of a Hillary Clinton, a Barack Obama or a John Kerry, but not a Bernie Sanders — which is a credit to Sanders.
The quadrennial political game of least worst, or how to scare the public to vote for presidential candidates who serve corporate power, comes this season with a new twist. Donald Trump, if he faces Pete Buttigieg, Joe Biden, Amy Klobuchar or Michael Bloomberg, will continue to be an amalgamation of Adolf Hitler, Al Capone and the Antichrist. But should Bernie Sanders manage to evade the snares, traps and minefields laid for him by the Democratic Party elites, should he miraculously become the party’s nominee, the game of least worst will radically change. All the terrifying demons that inhabit Trump will be instantly exorcised. But unlike in the biblical story of Jesus driving the demons into a herd of swine, they will be driven into the senator from Vermont. Trump will become the establishment’s reluctant least worse option. Sanders will become a leper. The Democratic and Republican party elites, joining forces as they did in the 1972 presidential election, will do to Sanders what they did to George McGovern, who lost in 49 of the 50 states.
“If Dems go on to nominate Sanders, the Russians will have to reconsider who to work for to best screw up the US. Sanders is just as polarizing as Trump AND he’ll ruin our economy and doesn’t care about our military,” former Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein (net worth $1.1 billion) tweeted. “If I’m Russian, I go with Sanders this time around.”
Blankfein, who calls for cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid and who headed Goldman Sachs when it paid Hillary Clinton $675,000 for three speaking engagements in 2013, laid out the stance of the billionaire class that controls the Democratic Party. The New York Times reported that Mike Novogratz, “a Goldman Sachs alumnus who runs the merchant bank Galaxy Digital, said Mr. Sanders’s oppositional nature had prompted ‘too many friends’ to say they would vote against him in November. ‘And they hate Trump,’ he said.”
“Nobody likes him, nobody wants to work with him, he got nothing done. He was a career politician. It’s all just baloney, and I feel so bad that people got sucked into it,” Hillary Clinton says of Sanders in a forthcoming television documentary.
The courtiers in the press, pathetically attempting to spin Sanders’ New Hampshire win into a victory for the corporate-endorsed alternatives, are part of the firing squad. “Running Sanders Against Trump Would Be an Act of Insanity” read the headline in a piece by Jonathan Chait in New York magazine. “No party nomination, with the possible exception of Barry Goldwater in 1964, has put forth a presidential nominee with the level of downside risk exposure as a Sanders-led ticket would bring. To nominate Sanders would be insane,” he wrote. David Frum — now a darling of the Democratic elites, like many other Republicans who morphed from George W. Bush supporters into critics of Trump — announced in The Atlantic that Bernie can’t win. “Sanders is a Marxist of the old school of dialectical materialism, from the land that time forgot,” Frum wrote. “Class relations are foundational; everything else is epiphenomenal.”
Jennifer Rubin declared in The Washington Post that a Sanders nomination would be a “disaster for the Democrats.” “Sanders’s campaign, like all primary campaigns, is a preview of the general-election race and, if elected, the administration he would lead,” Rubin wrote. “A nominee who insists on personally attacking all doubters and the media might be a model for the Republican Party, but Democrats are not going to win with their own Donald Trump, especially one who has burned bridges and stirred resentment in his own party.”
Thomas Friedman, in a column supporting Bloomberg, the newest savior in the protean Democratic firmament, wrote of Sanders: “On which planet in the Milky Way galaxy is an avowed ‘socialist’ — who wants to take away the private health care coverage of some 150 million Americans and replace it with a gigantic, untested Medicare-for-All program, which he’d also extend to illegal immigrants — going to defeat the Trump machine this year? It will cast Sanders as Che Guevara — and it won’t even be that hard.”
MSNBC commentator Chris Matthews, descending to the Red baiting employed by Blankfein, said that “if Castro and the Reds had won the Cold War there would have been executions in Central Park and I might have been one of the ones getting executed. And certain other people would be there cheering, okay?”
Despite the hyperventilating by corporate shills such as Matthews and Friedman, Sanders’ democratic socialism is essentially that of a New Deal Democrat. His political views would be part of the mainstream in France or Germany, where democratic socialism is an accepted part of the political landscape and is routinely challenged as too accommodationist by communists and radical socialists. Sanders calls for an end to our foreign wars, a reduction of the military budget, for “Medicare for All,” abolishing the death penalty, eliminating mandatory minimum sentences and private prisons, a return of Glass-Steagall, raising taxes on the wealthy, increasing the minimum wage to $15 an hour, canceling student debt, eliminating the Electoral College, banning fracking and breaking up agribusinesses. This does not qualify as a revolutionary agenda.
Sanders, unlike many more radical socialists, does not propose nationalizing the banks and the fossil fuel and arms industries. He does not call for the criminal prosecution of the financial elites who trashed the global economy or the politicians and generals who lied to launch preemptive wars, defined under international law as criminal wars of aggression, which have devastated much of the Middle East, resulted in hundreds of thousands of dead and millions of refugees and displaced people, and cost the nation between $5 trillion and $7 trillion. He does not call for worker ownership of factories and businesses. He does not promise to halt the government’s wholesale surveillance of the public. He does not intend to punish corporations that have moved manufacturing overseas. Most importantly, he believes, as I do not, that the political system, including the Democratic Party, can be reformed from within. He does not support sustained mass civil disobedience to bring the system down, the only hope we have of halting the climate emergency that threatens to doom the human race. On the political spectrum, he is, at best, an enlightened moderate. The vicious attacks against him by the elites are an indication of how anemic and withered our politics have become.
The Democrats have, once again, offered us their preselected corporate candidates. We can vote for a candidate who serves oligarchic power, albeit with more decorum than Trump, or we can see Trump shoved down our throats. That is the choice. It exposes the least worst option as a con, a mechanism used repeatedly to buttress corporate power. The elites know they would be safe in the hands of a Hillary Clinton, a Barack Obama or a John Kerry, but not a Bernie Sanders — which is a credit to Sanders.
The surrender to the “least worst” mantra in presidential election after presidential election has neutered the demands of labor, along with those organizations and groups fighting poverty, mass incarceration and police violence. The civil rights, women’s rights, environment justice and consumer rights movements, forced to back Democrats whose rhetoric is palatable but whose actions are inimical to their causes, get tossed overboard. Political leverage, in election after election, is surrendered without a fight. We are all made to kneel before the altar of the least worst. We get nothing in return. The least worst option has proved to be a recipe for steady decay.
The Democrats, especially after Ralph Nader’s 2000 presidential run, have erected numerous obstacles to block progressives inside and outside the party. They make ballot access difficult or impossible for people of color. They lock third-party candidates and often progressives in the Democratic Party, such as Dennis Kucinich, out of the presidential campaign debates. They turn campaigns into two-year-long spectacles that cost billions of dollars. They use superdelegates to fix the nominating process. They employ scare tactics to co-op those who should be the natural allies of third parties and progressive political movements.
The repeated cowardice of the liberal class, which backs a Democratic Party that in Europe would be considered a far-right party, saw it squander its credibility. Its rhetoric proved empty. Its moral posturing was a farce. It fought for nothing. In assault after assault on the working class it was complicit. If liberals — supposedly backers of parties and institutions that defend the interests of the working class — had abandoned the Democratic Party after President Bill Clinton pushed through the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement, Trump would not be in the White House. Why didn’t liberals walk out of the Democratic Party when Clinton and the Democratic Party leadership, including Biden, passed NAFTA? Why didn’t they walk out when the Clinton administration gutted welfare? Why didn’t they walk out when Clinton pushed through the 1999 Financial Services Modernization Act, which abolished the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act, designed to prevent the kind of banking crisis that trashed the global economy in 2008? Why didn’t they walk out when year after year the Democratic Party funded and expanded our endless wars? Why didn’t they walk out when the Democrats agreed to undercut due process and habeas corpus? Why didn’t they walk out when the Democrats helped approve the warrantless wiretapping and monitoring of American citizens? Why didn’t the liberals walk out when the party leadership refused to impose sanctions on Israel for its war crimes, enact serious environmental and health care reform or regulate Wall Street? At what point will liberals say “Enough”? At what point will they fight back?
By surrendering every election cycle to the least worst, liberals proved they have no breaking point. There never has been a line in the sand. They have stood for nothing.
Bernie Sanders arose in 2016 as a political force because he, like Trump, acknowledged the bleak reality imposed on working men and women by the billionaire class. This reality, a reality ignored by the ruling elites, was spoken out loud. The elites were held accountable. The Democratic elites scrambled, successfully, to deny Sanders the 2016 nomination. The Republican elites squabbled among themselves and failed to prevent Trump from becoming the party nominee.
The 2016 chessboard has reappeared, but this time in the Democratic Party primary. The Democratic hierarchy, as horrified by Sanders as the established Republican elites were by Trump, is flailing about trying to find a political savior to defeat the Red menace. Their ineptitude, Sanders’ primary asset, was displayed when they mangled the Iowa primary. They, like the Republican elites in 2016, are woefully disconnected from their constituency, attempting to persuade a public they betrayed and no longer understand.
Joe Biden, long a stooge of corporate America, for example, is frantically attempting to paint himself as a champion of poor people of color after his defeats in the largely white states of Iowa and New Hampshire. The onetime vice president, however, was one of the driving forces behind the strategy to take back the “law and order” issue from the Republicans. He and Bill Clinton orchestrated the doubling of the prison population, the militarization of the police, and mandatory minimum sentences along with juvenile boot camps, drug courts, policing in schools and the acceleration of the deportation of “criminal aliens.” During Biden’s leadership in the Senate — where he served from 1973 until 2009, when he became Obama’s vice president — the Congress approved 92 death-eligible crimes in an almost identical period. These Democratic “law and order” policies landed like hammer blows on poor communities of color, inflicting untold misery and egregious acts of injustice. And now Biden, who pounded the nails into those he crucified, is desperately trying to present himself to his victims as their savior. It is a sad metaphor for the bankruptcy of the Democratic Party.
Biden, however, is no longer the Democratic ruling elite’s flavor of the month. This mantle has been passed to Bloomberg, once the Republican mayor of New York and a Rudy Giuliani ally whose indiscriminate stop-and-frisk harassment of, mainly, African Americans and Latinos was ruled unconstitutional. Bloomberg, whose net worth is estimated at $61.8 billion, said he is ready to spend $1 billion of his own money on his campaign, what The New York Times has called “a waterfall of cash.” He has bought the loyalty of much of the ruling Democratic establishment. He spent, for example, $110 million in 2018 alone to support 24 candidates now in Congress. He is saturating the airwaves with commercials. He is lavishing high salaries and perks on his huge campaign staff. Sanders, or anyone else defying the billionaire class, cannot compete financially. The last desperate gasp of the Democratic Party establishment is to buy the election. Bloomberg is ready to oblige. After all, Bloomberg’s money worked miracles in amassing allies to overturn New York City term limits so he could serve a third term as mayor.
But will it work? Will the Democratic elites and Bloomberg be able to smother the Democratic primaries with so much money that Sanders is shut out?
“As with Republicans in 2016, the defining characteristic of the 2020 Democratic race has been the unwieldy size of the field,” Matt Taibbi writes. “The same identity crisis lurking under the Republican clown car afflicted this year’s Democratic contest: Because neither donors nor party leaders nor pundits could figure out what they should be pretending to stand for, they couldn’t coalesce around any one candidate. These constant mercurial shifts in ‘momentum’ — it’s Pete! It’s Amy! Paging Mike Bloomberg! — have eroded the kingmaking power of the Democratic leadership. They are eating the party from within, and seem poised to continue doing so.”
If Sanders gets the nomination it will be due to the Keystone Cops ineptitude of the Democratic leadership, one that as Taibbi points out replicates the ineptitude of the Republican elites in 2016. But this time there will be a crucial difference. The ruling elites, once divided between Trump and Hillary Clinton, with most of the elites preferring Clinton, will be united against Sanders. They will back Trump as the least worst. The corporate media will turn its venom, now directed at Trump, toward Sanders. The Democratic Party’s mask will come off. It will be open warfare between them and us.
“the Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things… They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.”
The longing for the socialist dream comes in part from the great success of capitalism as an engine of prosperity. From the nineteenth century onwards, the entrepreneurial economy created prosperity on a scale that had never been seen before in history.The socialists, however, believed economic success would become even greater in a society of egalitarian redistribution. The socialists expect that under their rule, the economy would become more productive and society more just.
This illusion of obtaining prosperity and justice under socialism was already evident in the Communist Manifestoof 1848. In their pamphlet, Karl Marx and his sponsor Friedrich Engels enthusiastically praised capitalist achievements:
“The bourgeoisie,” they declared, “has been the first to show what man’s activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former Exoduses of nations and crusades.”
During its rule, the bourgeoisie
has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalization of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground – what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labor?
Yet, according to Marx and Engels, the capitalist system is doomed, and private property stands in the way to a perfect society: “the theory of the communists may be summed up in the single sentence: abolition of private property.” Doing away with private property implies the “abolition of bourgeois individuality, bourgeois independence, and bourgeois freedom…”
For Marx and Engels, the bourgeois family remained a fundamental part of liberal and capitalist. Thus, under communism, the “bourgeois family will vanish along with country, nationality, and religion.”
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