Jonah Goldberg‘s cover story in the latest issue of Commentary magazine offers the latest critique of French economist Thomas Piketty‘s theories about capitalism and income inequality. Goldberg explores the “Marxiness” of Piketty’s prognostication in passages like the following one, which readers of today’s CarolinaJournal.com Daily Journal should appreciate.
A third claim—one can’t call them arguments because they don’t rise to that level—is that the super rich will rig democracy to their advantage. This, too, has a faint Marxist echo, featuring as it does the assumption that capitalist overlords form a homogenous political class bent on exploitation. One must only read the newspaper to know that this is nonsense on stilts. At this very moment, George Soros, Tom Steyer, and other liberal billionaires are in a hammer-and-tongs political battle with Sheldon Adelson, Charles and David Koch, and other conservative or libertarian billionaires. And the evidence that either side has the power to buy elections is discredited almost every November. This is not to say that our democracy couldn’t be healthier or that wealthy special interests do not cause real problems, but America is hardly being run today by characters out of a Thomas Nast cartoon. It’s being run, instead, by the son of a teenage single mother from Hawaii, the son of a barkeep from Ohio who became speaker of the House, and a miner’s son from Nevada who grew up in a shack with no running water before becoming majority leader of the Senate—none of them born into wealth, to put it mildly.
