Economics professor Richard Ebeling examines the economics and philosophy of Thomas Piketty’s much-discussed new book in this essay.
I like this paragraph in particular: “Modern egalitarians like Piketty are locked into a pre-capitalist mindset when, indeed, accumulated wealth was most often the product of theft, murder, and deception. They, and the socialists who came before them, seemingly find it impossible to understand that classical liberalism and free market capitalism frees production and wealth from political power.”
Imagine how much worse off not only the poor, but most of society would be if we had embraced Piketty’s redistributionist ideas a century ago. Instead of accumulated wealth going into economic development and into philanthropy, it would have gone into the maw of the state, to be squandered on all of the things politicians like. True, we’d probably have less inequality, but almost everyone would be much poorer. There wasn’t much inequality among hunter/gatherer tribes either.
