Do We Need a Capitalist Civil War?

 From Joel Kotkin, at UnHerd, "The working class suffer when elites agree":

We Americans like to think of ourselves as a thoroughly modern people — living proof of what, with enough toil and grit, the rest of the free world can one day hope to be. And yet for all our progressivism and idealism, America’s political culture finds itself unable to escape the past. We may be living in a 21st century democracy, but that “democracy” increasingly resembles something that could have been plucked out of feudal Europe or, perhaps more accurately, feudal Japan.

For much of its history, Japanese politics was characterised by conflicts among its ruling daimyo, and later between the great industrial zaibatsu who replaced them as dominant powers. Similarly, America’s politics is now being shaped by a civil war not between classes, but within the ruling capitalist elite.

As the 2022 congressional elections approach, two sides are polishing their armour and fletching their arrows. In one corner stand the daimyo of the gentry corporate elite, largely drawn from the ranks of tech oligarchs and much of Wall Street. Their focus lies in the creation of a capitalist utopia rooted in paternalistic state control, much along the lines of the corporatist “Great Reset”. In the other corner, meanwhile, stand their opponents to the Right, largely made up of those who own private capital and are therefore anxious not to see their activities curbed.

These divisions reflect profound differences in industry, reminiscent of the 19th-century conflicts between aristocratic merchants and British manufacturers, or the one that broke out between the daimyo who embraced industry and those samurai who stubbornly hewed to traditional ways. Drawing on this, the French economist Thomas Piketty aptly divides our capitalist class into what he calls “the Brahmin Left” and the “merchant Right”. One side, as its caste association assumes, tends to see itself as more spiritually enlightened, as priests of the progressive secular religion. The merchant side, however, is more concerned with market competition (particularly from China), the cost of goods, and the impact of regulatory policies on their core businesses.

Today, the Brahmin Left has its base in large corporations and investors, and has allied itself with the academic and media establishments, financing non-profits and generally supporting increasingly intrusive government. By contrast, the merchant Right draws its natural support from the traditional middle class — skilled workers, high-street businesspeople, and small property owners — who also have become the bulwark of the Trumpian Republican Party...

Still more.

 

Thomas Piketty, Capital and Ideology

At Amazon, Thomas Piketty, Capital and Ideology.

What the New Socialists Want More Than Anything is to Punish the Rich

Radical leftists are looking to fulfill Marx's vision in the 21st century: Expropriate the expropriators!

Here's Jerry Z. Muller, at Foreign Affairs, "The Neosocialist Delusion: Wealth Is Not the Problem":

The neosocialists are descended from Rousseau. They downplay poverty and fetishize equality, focus on wealth distribution rather than wealth creation, and seem to care as much about lowering those at the top as raising those at the bottom.

The movement’s signature policy proposal is a wealth tax, an annual levy on household assets. Touted by economists such as Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman, all associated with the Paris School of Economics, the concept has been embraced by both Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, U.S. senators from Vermont and Massachusetts, respectively, who are running for the Democratic presidential nomination. At first, Warren advocated a two percent tax on households worth more than $50 million and a three percent tax on billionaires. Later, pressed on how she would pay for her proposed universal health insurance, she doubled the billionaire tax to six percent. Sanders’s plan starts at taxing $16 million in assets at one percent and tops out at an eight percent tax for assets exceeding $10 billion.

The radicalism of this approach is often underestimated. Many people conflate wealth taxes with higher income taxes or see them as mere extensions of a similar concept. But wealth taxes are fundamentally different instruments with much broader ramifications for economic dynamism and individual liberty.

The main effect of a wealth tax would be to discourage wealthy individuals from holding demonstrable assets. Any individual or household within shouting distance of the threshold would have to get its assets valued annually, imposing costs and creating a permanent jobs program for tax lawyers and accountants, whose chief responsibility would be to figure out ways around the law, including moving assets abroad.

A wealth tax would dramatically curtail private investment. The higher people rise on the economic ladder, the more of their resources go to investment instead of consumption. Those investments, in turn, often fuel innovative, risky ventures, which get funded in the hopes that they will eventually produce still greater gains. A wealth tax would upend the incentive structure for rich people, causing many to stop funding productive economic activity and focus instead on reducing their tax exposure and hiding their assets.

Warren contends that calculating one’s wealth tax would be as easy as calculating one’s property tax, but that is ridiculous. Take a firm that has a market value but no income—a frequent situation for startups but also common for established firms in various situations, such as a turnaround. Rich investors in such firms would have to sell their shares to pay the wealth tax or force the companies to disburse cash rather than invest in the future. Either way, the tax would discourage investment, reduce innovation, and encourage short-term thinking.

A wealth tax, finally, would force everyone whose assets were near its minimal threshold to give the government a full accounting of all those assets every year: homes, furniture, vehicles, heirlooms, bank accounts, investments and liabilities, and more. The result would be a huge expansion of the reach of government into citizens’ lives, a corresponding reduction in citizens’ privacy, and the accumulation and storage of vast amounts of highly sensitive data with few safeguards to prevent their misuse.

It is not only successful individuals who draw the neosocialists’ ire; it is also successful companies. If a firm grows big enough to become famous, it becomes a potential target of vilification; if it grows too big, it becomes a target for destruction. Sanders, Warren, and Ocasio-Cortez, a Democratic representative from New York, accordingly, have all pledged to break up Amazon, Facebook, and Google.

Here they can draw on a venerable antimonopoly tradition in American political culture from the trustbusters on, rooted in the assumption that the further away you move from Smith’s ideal of perfect competition among many small firms, the more the public is hurt. The economist Joseph Schumpeter, however, argued that Smith had greatly underestimated both the dynamism of capitalism and the role of entrepreneurs in driving it. Capitalism’s manifold benefits didn’t just happen; they were created, by a relatively small group of people responsible for introducing new products, services, and business methods. Entrepreneurs sought the big profits associated with temporary monopolies and so were driven to create whole new industries they could dominate.

Large companies, Schumpeter realized, acted as engines of innovation, plowing back some of their profits into research and development and encouraging others to do the same in the hopes of becoming an acquisition target. He would have been delighted with Silicon Valley, viewing technology giants such as Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft as poster children for the enormous benefits to consumers that entrepreneurs generate.

Companies such as Amazon and Walmart, meanwhile, maintain their position through furious competition in service and price, contributing to the virtual elimination of inflation in the American economy. And yet it is precisely these dynamic, successful, customer-oriented companies that the neosocialists want to tax heavily, burden with regulations, and cut up for parts.

Still more.

Image Credit: The People's Cube, "Chiquita Khrushchev: 'We will bury you!'."

Labour's Stunning Shellacking

It's a realignment. From Toby Young, at Quillette, "Britain’s Labour Party Got Woke — And Now It’s Broke":

“The disappearance of Labour’s traditional base isn’t just the story of this election, but one of the main themes of Britain’s post-war political history.” https://t.co/O0QYq4RFFC

— Quillette (@Quillette) December 15, 2019

The crumbling of the ‘Red Wall’ is the big story of this election and some commentators are describing it as a “one off.” The conventional wisdom is that working class voters have “lent” their votes to the Conservatives and, barring an upset, will give them back next time round. It’s Brexit, supposedly, that has been the game-changer—an excuse leapt on by Corbyn’s outriders in the media, who are loathe to blame Labour’s defeat on their man.

If you look at the working class constituencies that turned blue, most of them voted to leave the European Union in 2016 by a significant margin—Great Grimsby, for instance, an English sea port in Yorkshire, where Leave outpolled Remain by 71.45 to 28.55 per cent. Labour’s problem, according to this analysis, is that it didn’t commit to taking Britain out of the EU during the campaign but instead said it would negotiate a new exit deal and then hold a second referendum in which the public would be able to choose between that deal and Remain. This fudge may have been enough to keep graduates on side, but it alienated working class Leave voters in England’s rust belt.

This analysis doesn’t bear much scrutiny. To begin with, the desertion of Labour by its working class supporters—and its increasing popularity with more affluent, better educated voters—is a long-term trend, not an aberration. The disappearance of Labour’s traditional base isn’t just the story of this election, but one of the main themes of Britain’s post-war political history. At its height, Labour managed to assemble a coalition of university-educated liberals in London and the South and low-income voters in Britain’s industrial heartlands in the Midlands and the North—“between Hampstead and Hull,” as the saying goes. But mass immigration and globalization have driven a wedge between Labour’s middle class and working class supporters, as has Britain’s growing welfare bill and its membership of the European Union.

At the October election in 1974, 49 per cent of skilled workers (C2) and 57 per cent of semi-skilled and unskilled workers (DE) voted Labour; by 2010, those numbers had fallen to 29 per cent and 40 per cent respectively. Among middle class voters (ABC1), support for the Conservatives fell over the same time period from 56 per cent in 1974 to 39 per cent in 2010. In 1974, Labour enjoyed a 23-point lead among skilled working class voters (C2), but by 2010 the Conservatives had overtaken them in this demo to lead by eight points—a pattern repeated in 2017. Among graduates, by contrast, Labour led by 17 points in 2017, up from a two-point lead in 2015. (See this data table compiled by Ipsos MORI, a polling company.)

Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters have talked a good deal about winning back these working class voters, but his policy positions haven’t been designed to appeal to them. I’m not just talking about his ambivalence on Brexit—there’s a widespread feeling among voters who value flag, faith and family that Corbyn isn’t one of them. Before he became Labour leader in 2015, he was an energetic protestor against nearly every armed conflict Britain has been involved in since Suez, including the Falklands War. He’s also called for the abandonment of Britain’s independent nuclear deterrent, the withdrawal of the UK from NATO and the dismantling of our security services—not to mention declining to sing the National Anthem at a Battle of Britain service in 2015. From the point of view of many working class voters, for whom love of country is still a deeply felt emotion, Corbyn seems to side with the country’s enemies more often than he does with Britain.

Corbyn’s victory in the Labour leadership election was followed by a surge in party membership— from 193,754 at the end of 2014 to 388,103 by the end of 2015. But the activists he appeals to are predominantly middle class. According to internal Party data leaked to the Guardian, a disproportionate number of them are “high status city dwellers” who own their own homes.

A careful analysis of the policies set out in Labour’s latest manifesto reveals that the main beneficiaries of the party’s proposed increase in public expenditure—which the Conservatives costed at an eye-watering £1.2 trillion—would be its middle class supporters.

For instance, the party pledged to cut rail fares by 33 per cent and pay for it by slashing the money spent on roads. But only 11 per cent of Britain’s commuters travel by train compared to 68 per cent who drive—and the former tend to be more affluent than the latter. Corbyn also promised to abolish university tuition fees at a cost of £7.2 billion per annum, a deeply regressive policy which, according to the Institute of Fiscal Studies, would benefit middle- and high-earning graduates with “very little” upside for those on low incomes.

It’s also worth noting that Corbyn’s interests and appearance—he’s a 70-year-old vegetarian with a fondness for train-drivers’ hats who has spent his life immersed in protest politics—strike many working class voters as “weird,” a word that kept coming up on the doorstep according to my fellow canvasser in Newcastle. He’s also presided over the invasion of his party by virulent anti-Semites and Labour is currently in the midst of an investigation by Britain’s Equality and Human Rights Commission thanks to his failure to deal with this. One of his supporters has already blamed the Jews for Labour’s defeat.

But Corbyn isn’t the main reason C2DE voters have turned away from Labour, any more than Brexit is. Rather, they’ve both exacerbated a trend that’s been underway for at least 45 years, which is the fracturing of the “Hampstead and Hull” coalition and the ebbing away of Labour’s working class support.

Another, related phenomenon that’s been overlooked is that these “topsy turvey” politics are hardly unique to Britain. Left-of-center parties in most parts of the Anglosphere, as well as other Western democracies, have seen the equivalent of their own ‘Red Walls’ collapsing. One of the reasons Scott Morrison’s Liberals confounded expectations to win the Australian election last May was because Bill Shorten’s Labour Party was so unpopular in traditional working class areas like Queensland, and support for socially democratic parties outside the large cities in Scandinavia has cratered over the past 15 years or so.

Thomas Piketty, the French Marxist, wrote a paper about this phenomenon last year entitled ‘Brahmin Left vs Merchant Right: Rising Inequality and the Changing Structure of Political Conflict’ and it’s the subject of Capital and Ideology, his new book. His hypothesis is that politics in the US, Britain, and France—he confines his analysis to those three countries—is dominated by the struggle between two elite groups: the Brahmin Left and the Merchant Right. He points out that left-wing parties in the US, Britain and France used to rely on ‘nativist’ voters to win elections—low education, low income—but since the 1970s have begun to attract more and more ‘globalist’ voters—high education, high income (with the exception of the top 10 per cent of income earners). The nativists, meanwhile, have drifted to the Right, forming a coalition with the business elite. He crunches the data to show that in the US, from the 1940s to the 1960s, the more educated people were, the more likely they were to vote Republican. Now, the opposite is true, with 70% of voters with masters degrees voting for Hilary in 2016. “The trend is virtually identical in all three countries,” he writes.

In Piketty’s view, the electoral preferences of the post-industrial working class—the precariat—is a kind of false consciousness, often engendered by populist snake-charmers like Matteo Salvini and Viktor Orban. He’s intensely suspicious of the unholy alliance between super-rich “merchants” and the lumpen proletariat, and similar noises have been made about the levels of support Boris has managed to attract...

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Far-Left Scholars Slam Angela Merkel in 'Open Letter' on Greece: 'Austerity Has Failed'

Actually, the socialist welfare state has failed, with Greece being Exhibit A.

But when you've got folks like Fidel Castro and Vladimir Putin propping up Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, you know the left sees an opening to bring down the leading capitalist oppressors in the Western camp.

From Thomas Piketty , Jeffrey Sachs , Heiner Flassbeck, Dani Rodrik, and Simon Wren-Lewis, at the Nation, "Austerity Has Failed: An Open Letter From Thomas Piketty to Angela Merkel":

As most of the world knew it would, the financial demands made by Europe have crushed the Greek economy, led to mass unemployment, a collapse of the banking system, made the external debt crisis far worse, with the debt problem escalating to an unpayable 175 percent of GDP. The economy now lies broken with tax receipts nose-diving, output and employment depressed, and businesses starved of capital.

The humanitarian impact has been colossal—40 percent of children now live in poverty, infant mortality is sky-rocketing and youth unemployment is close to 50 percent. Corruption, tax evasion and bad accounting by previous Greek governments helped create the debt problem. The Greeks have complied with much of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s call for austerity—cut salaries, cut government spending, slashed pensions, privatized and deregulated, and raised taxes. But in recent years the series of so-called adjustment programs inflicted on the likes of Greece has served only to make a Great Depression the likes of which have been unseen in Europe since 1929-1933. The medicine prescribed by the German Finance Ministry and Brussels has bled the patient, not cured the disease.

Together we urge Chancellor Merkel and the Troika to consider a course correction, to avoid further disaster and enable Greece to remain in the eurozone. Right now, the Greek government is being asked to put a gun to its head and pull the trigger. Sadly, the bullet will not only kill off Greece’s future in Europe. The collateral damage will kill the Eurozone as a beacon of hope, democracy and prosperity, and could lead to far-reaching economic consequences across the world.

In the 1950s, Europe was founded on the forgiveness of past debts, notably Germany’s, which generated a massive contribution to post-war economic growth and peace. Today we need to restructure and reduce Greek debt, give the economy breathing room to recover, and allow Greece to pay off a reduced burden of debt over a long period of time. Now is the time for a humane rethink of the punitive and failed program of austerity of recent years and to agree to a major reduction of Greece’s debts in conjunction with much needed reforms in Greece.

To Chancellor Merkel our message is clear; we urge you to take this vital action of leadership for Greece and Germany, and also for the world. History will remember you for your actions this week. We expect and count on you to provide the bold and generous steps towards Greece that will serve Europe for generations to come.

Sincerely,

Heiner Flassbeck, former State Secretary in the German Federal Ministry of Finance

Thomas Piketty, Professor of Economics at the Paris School of Economics

Jeffrey D. Sachs, Professor of Sustainable Development, Professor of Health Policy and Management, and Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University

Dani Rodrik, Ford Foundation Professor of International Political Economy, Harvard Kennedy School

Simon Wren-Lewis, Professor of Economic Policy, Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford

Interesting, but it's not all Germany's fault.

The world historical ideological battles over this are pretty entertaining, though.

Remember, beyond Greece the entire postwar project of European unification is at risk. Maybe Germany doesn't like that so much either.

See my earlier entry, "Germany's Power Polarizes Europe."

Ross Douthat on the Left's Post-Post Racial Political Correctness

Douthat's got some interesting and considerably astute observations on the left's recent blow-up over over Jonathan Chait's essay on regressive leftist P.C. culture.

See, "Does Political Correctness Work?", and "Our Loud, Proud Left":

FOR the last week, liberal journalists have been furiously debating whether a new political correctness has swept over the American left. The instigator of this argument was New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait, normally a scourge of Republicans, whose essay on what he dubbed “the new P.C.” critiqued left-wing activists for their zeal to play language cop, shout down arguments and shut down debate outright.

It will surprise absolutely nobody that I think the phenomenon that Chait describes is real. But I come not to judge but to explain — because whether you like or loathe the “P.C.” label, the rise of a more assertive cultural left is clearly one of the defining features of the later Obama years. This assertiveness is palpable among younger activists, on campus and online; it’s visible in controversy after controversy, from Ferguson to campus rape. And it’s interesting to think about exactly where it’s coming from.

The first source, probably, is disappointment with other forms of left-wing politics. A decade ago, the left’s energy was focused on Iraq; in President Obama’s first term, it was divided between his quest for a new New Deal and Occupy Wall Street’s free-form radicalism. But now the antiwar movement is moribund, Occupy has gone the way of the Yippies and it’s been years since the White House proposed a new tax or spending plan that wasn’t D.O.A.

What’s more, despite all the books sold by Thomas Piketty, the paths forward for progressive economic policy are mostly blocked — and not only by a well-entrenched Republican Party, but by liberalism’s ongoing inability to raise the taxes required to pay for the welfare state we already have. Since a long, slow, grinding battle over how to pay for those commitments is unlikely to fire anyone’s imagination, it’s not surprising that cultural causes — race, sex, identity — suddenly seem vastly more appealing.

The second wellspring is a more specific sort of disillusionment. Call it post-post-racialism: a hangover after the heady experience of electing America’s first black president; a frustration with the persistence of racial divides, even in an age of elite African-American achievement; and a sense of outrage over particular tragedies (Trayvon Martin, Ferguson) that seem to lay injustice bare.

Post-post-racial sentiment is connected to economic disappointments, because minorities have fared particularly poorly in the Great Recession’s aftermath...

'Share the Wealth' Failing to Sell

From Michael Barone, at RCP, "Nobody Is Pushing Thomas Piketty's Policies to Combat Economic Inequality":

Last spring, you may remember, the French economist Thomas Piketty was all the rage in certain enlightened circles. His book "Capital" shot up to the No. 1 spot on bestseller lists, and many economists praised his statistics showing increased income and wealth inequality. Piketty argued that, absent a world war, returns to capital will exceed economic growth, inevitably producing growing inequality in the 21st century.

There are problems with Piketty's -- or anyone else's -- statistics. Reliance on U.S. income tax returns overlooks the fact that tax cuts encourage people to realize income and misses non-taxable income such as welfare and Social Security payments.

Still, there has clearly been a boom in the incomes and wealth of the top 1 percent here and worldwide. Piketty sees this as a threat to democracy. Liberal economists and pundits hoped that his revelations would finally get politicians to support policies like Piketty's 80 percent tax rate on high incomes and progressive tax on great wealth -- and get the masses to vote for them.

So far it hasn't happened here or just about anywhere.

You didn't see any campaign ads calling for Piketty taxes this fall. You didn't even see any ads hailing Democrats for having raised taxes on high earners in early 2013. Democratic candidates in seriously contested races didn't come close to advocating such policies.

You may have heard some Democrats bemoaning income inequality. The idea that the rich get richer while everyone else doesn't gets pretty wide agreement in the polls. So does the Democrats' one redistributionist policy -- raising the minimum wage.

As a policy to address inequality, though, it's rather pathetic. About half of minimum wage earners are not in the lowest fifth households in income. Even fewer are their own household's primary earner. Almost all economists agree that when the minimum wage is raised, some employees lose their jobs.

It is only slightly hyperbolic to say that an increased minimum wage is a transfer of income from fast-food customers to fast-food workers minus those who are replaced by kiosks. That's not a very effective way to sock it to the top 1 percent.

Even after the election, some Democrats argue that they didn't hit the issue hard enough. One Democrat's advice to President Obama, according to Politico, "is focus on income inequality, and talk about and propose things, and just be a fierce advocate of addressing the economic divide. That will leave people after two years saying the Democratic Party really stands for something."

"Propose things" -- but what? A recent Congressional Budget Office report shows that when you measure federal taxes paid minus federal transfers received (welfare, food stamps, Social Security, etc.), the top 20 percent of earners pay an average of $46,500. The next 20 percent pay an average of $700. The bottom three-fifths get back more than they pay. Plus, the U.S. already relies more heavily on the income tax for revenues than any other advanced economy nation.

In other words, America already has lots of economic redistribution. American voters evidently sense that more redistribution would sap economic growth. They're willing to throw a little to minimum wage earners, but they don't want to kill the geese laying the golden eggs.

Well, it's all crashing down for the idiot leftists, and it ain't over yet.

More.

Democrat Midterm Autopsy

Actually, the DNC hasn't offered an autopsy yet, and I doubt they will until they complete the stages of grief. (And I have no idea how long the denial stage lasts.)

But some folks are trying to get a head start, realizing (grudgingly) that a narrow focus on so-called "women's issues" like "equal pay" isn't doing the trick.

See NYT's Room for Debate (FWIW, heh), "Can the Red Tide Be Turned Back?"

I don't see anything particulary "bold" at the link, nor does what you'll see amount to any "grand vision" other than repackaging most of the progressive complaints about race, immigration, and "inequality" we've heard throughout the Obama years. The only surprise is that Thomas Piketty's not a contributor, lol!

Thomas Piketty Cooked the Data in 'Capital in the Twenty-First Century'

Well, what do we have here?

At Legal Insurrection, "Report: Thomas Piketty’s numbers are off."

They're "off" --- to say the least. Shoot, they're "manufactured" is probably closer to the truth.

At Instapundit, "LEFTY WISH-FULFILLMENT BOOK ALL FAKED-UP? THIS IS MY SHOCKED FACE. The Financial Times Isn’t Just Saying Piketty Made A Mistake — They’re Saying He Manipulated Data."

Piketty admits he made "some improvements" in the data:

The central theme of Prof Piketty’s work is that wealth inequalities are heading back up to levels last seen before the first world war. The investigation undercuts this claim, indicating there is little evidence in Prof Piketty’s original sources to bear out the thesis that an increasing share of total wealth is held by the richest few.

Prof Piketty, 43, provides detailed sourcing for his estimates of wealth inequality in Europe and the US over the past 200 years. In his spreadsheets, however, there are transcription errors from the original sources and incorrect formulas. It also appears that some of the data are cherry-picked or constructed without an original source.

Contacted by the FT, Prof Piketty said he had used “a very diverse and heterogeneous set of data sources ... [on which] one needs to make a number of adjustments to the raw data sources.

“I have no doubt that my historical data series can be improved and will be improved in the future ... but I would be very surprised if any of the substantive conclusion about the long-run evolution of wealth distributions was much affected by these improvements,” he said.

Right.

I'd be "very surprised" if the rest of his flimflam socialist tome doesn't keep falling apart at the seams.



More from Erika Johnson, at Hot Air, "Financial Times: We’ve found some, ahem, “serious inconsistencies” in Thomas Piketty’s numbers." And at Memeorandum.

Leftist Publisher Lawrence & Wishart Issues Takedown Notice Against #Marxist Internet Archive

OMG this is rich.

As I started reading the piece I checked over at the Marxist Internet Archive, which posted an announcement that as of April 30th they were taking down their Marx collection, heh.

And the best part? The communists over at Crooked Timber are all up in a lather about it, bwhahaha!!! See, "Karlo Marx and Fredrich Engels / Came to the checkout at the 7-11."

Shoot, even the New York Times gets the irony, "Claiming a Copyright on Marx? How Uncomradely":

The Marxist Internet Archive, a website devoted to radical writers and thinkers, recently received an email: It must take down hundreds of works by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels or face legal consequences.

The warning didn’t come from a multinational media conglomerate but from a small, leftist publisher, Lawrence & Wishart, which asserted copyright ownership over the 50-volume, English-language edition of Marx’s and Engels’s writings.

To some, it was “uncomradely” that fellow radicals would deploy the capitalist tool of intellectual property law to keep Marx’s and Engels’s writings off the Internet. And it wasn’t lost on the archive’s supporters that the deadline for complying with the order came on the eve of May 1, International Workers’ Day.

“Marx and Engels belong to the working class of the world spiritually, they are that important,” said David Walters, one of the organizers of the Marxist archive. “I would think Marx would want the most prolific and free distribution of his ideas possible — he wasn’t in it for the money.”

Still, Mr. Walters said the archive respected the publisher’s copyright, which covers the translated works, not the German originals from the 19th century. On Wednesday, the archive removed the disputed writings with a note blaming the publisher and a bold headline: “File No Longer Available!”

The fight over online control of Marx’s works comes at a historical moment when his ideas have found a new relevance, whether because the financial crisis of 2008 shook people’s confidence in global capitalism or, with the passage of time, the Marx name has become less shackled to the legacy of the Soviet Union. The unlikely best seller by the French economist Thomas Piketty, “Capital in the 21st Century,” harks back to Marx’s work, examining historical trends toward inequality in wealth.

Despite this boomlet in interest, however, Lawrence & Wishart, located in East London, hardly expects to have an online hit on its hands, said Sally Davison, the publisher’s managing editor. The goal is to create a digital edition to sell to libraries in place of a print edition, which costs roughly $1,500 for the 50 volumes.

Lulz.

Even Marxist collectivists can't resist the filthy lucre when it suits them. Communism: the biggest scam in world history.

More at the link.

And really, the statement from Lawrence & Wishart is the kicker!

Over the last couple of days Lawrence & Wishart has been subject to campaign of online abuse because we have asked for our copyright on the scholarly edition of the Collected Works of Marx and Engels to be respected. The panic being spread to the effect that L&W is ‘claiming copyright’ for the entirety of Marx and Engels’ output is baseless and largely motivated by political sectarianism from groups and individuals who have never been friendly to L&W.

Because online Marxist trolls are so compassionate lol!

Why a Global Tax on Wealth Won't End Inequality

A review of Thomas Piketty's, Capital in the Twenty-first Century.

From Tyler Cowen, at Foreign Affairs, "Capital Punishment."

PREVIOUSLY: "Bill Moyers and Paul Krugman Use Thomas Piketty's Capital to Attack America's 'Ugliness' and 'Racism'," and "Thomas Piketty and the Renaissance of Collectivist Hatred."

Thomas Piketty and the Renaissance of Collectivist Hatred

From David Harsanyi, at the Federalist, "Pundits of the World Unite! What Thomas Piketty’s Popularity Tells Us About The Liberal Press."

As I write this, Thomas Piketty’s book “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” is #1 on Amazon. It’s been deemed an “important book” by a bunch of  smart people. Why not? It validates many of the preconceived notions progressives have about capitalism: Inequality is growing. Mobility is shrinking. Meritocracy is dead. We all live in a sprawling zero-sum fallacy.  And so on.

The book, as you probably know, has also sparked nonstop conversation in political and media circles. Though it’s best to let economists debunk Piketty’s methodology and data, it is worth pointing out that liberal pundits and writers have not only enthusiastically and unconditionally embraced a book on economics, or even a run-of-the-mill leftist polemic, but a hard-left manifesto.

Now, I realize we’re all supposed to accept the fact that conservatives are alone in embracing fringe economic ideas. But how does a book that evokes Marx and talks about tweaking the Soviet experiment find so much love from people who consider themselves rational, evidence-driven moderates?

Put it this way: It’s unlikely that Democrats would have praised a book like this 20 years ago – or even 10. Nowadays, Jack Lew – better known as the Treasury Secretary of the United States of America - takes time to chit chat with the author.

Piketty, a professor at the Paris School of Economics, argues that capitalism allocates resources efficiently but unfairly apportions income. And the excessive accumulation of wealth by the one percent – nay, the .01 percent — is not only corrupt, but an inequality that makes democracy unsustainable. And it’s going to get worse.  So only a massive transfer of wealth could make our nation whole again.

Here is his thesis, boiled down:

When the rate of return on capital exceeds the rate of growth of output and income, as it did in the nineteenth century and seems quite likely to do again in the twenty-first, capitalism automatically generates arbitrary and unsustainable inequalities that radically undermine the meritocratic values on which democratic societies are based.

I’d ask if there are any historical examples that prove that skewed wealth in a generally prosperous nation is more damaging to its democratic institutions than the reallocation of wealth by a coercive state. But then I realize, as with any Marxist revival, the answer is: This time we’re gonna do it right!

Judging from the political rhetoric of the day, liberals already believe that higher taxes on the wealthy can create more opportunity for the poor and middle class. While some of us would argue that the nexus between high taxes and economic growth is tenuous, debating whether the top marginal tax rate should be 25 or 33 or 35 percent is well within the boundaries of a centrist debate. But that’s not Piketty’s position.

Here’s how Daniel Shuchman put it in a recent Wall Street Journal review:

Mr. Piketty urges an 80% tax rate on incomes starting at “$500,000 or $1 million.” This is not to raise money for education or to increase unemployment benefits. Quite the contrary, he does not expect such a tax to bring in much revenue, because its purpose is simply “to put an end to such incomes.”

Imagine there’s no rich people. You can say he’s a dreamer, but he’s not the only one.

Keep reading.

Bottom line: Leftists hate wealth. For them people having lots of money, and especially having money and being able to pass it on to their children through inheritance, is evil.

But what's truly evil is the literally pathological hatred leftists have toward the independent and prosperous. Remember, for leftists a free society is rife with "ugliness" and "racism," simply because the natural diversity of the free market conflicts with the grip-of-steel collectivism of the neo-Stalinist left.

The more your read on this Piketty debate the more you will see how terribly wrong politics has turned during this Obama interregnum. The current collectivism hasn't emerged from a vacuum. The real ugliness today is the vicious partisan class warfare the left has waged from the president on down. And now this Piketty dolt has jumped in with a partisan screed to give present-day Marxists a shot in the arm.

I'll have more, because you can't push back enough against these people.

RELATED: "The Misguided Resurgence of Marxist Collectivism," and "Bill Moyers and Paul Krugman Use Thomas Piketty's Capital to Attack America's 'Ugliness' and 'Racism'."

Bill Moyers and Paul Krugman Use Thomas Piketty's Capital to Attack America's 'Ugliness' and 'Racism'

Well, I'm sure most readers have read my initial piece on the Piketty book by now, "The Misguided Resurgence of Marxist Collectivism."

It turns out I was on to more than I realized at the time.

Every now and then you have a book that catches the moment's zeitgeist, and Capital in the Twenty-First Century sure has the makings of another earth-shaker. (I'm finding myself reminded of the urgent reception of Paul Kennedy's The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers back in 1987, a time when the country's was awash in massive Reagan-era deficits and frightened to death of the prospect of Japan as No. 1.) At the very least members of the Washington establishment will be gleefully brandishing this tome while demanding an increase in top tax rates reminiscent of the "glory" days of the Roosevelt administration.

And right on cue, the big bloviating, hypocritical luxury leftists are pumping this book like there's no tomorrow. I watched this full 20-minute Bill Moyers interview with far-left economist Paul Krugman earlier today. It's a classic "highbrow" PBS joint. Behold these two left-wing know-it-alls pontificating on how horrible is the U.S. economy in this new "Gilded Age" of allegedly extreme economic inequality. And not long into the discussion we get to the root of the left's disgusting and divisive racism and class warfare. At around 14:30 minutes Moyers bemoans society's alleged "ugliness," an obviously coded attack on those conservatives in particular who've worked to prevent a return to the confiscatory tax rates of last century. And not to disappoint, Krugman intercepts the dog whistle and launches into a typical attack on certain groups in society (ahem, tea party types, cough, hack) who are animated by those ever-present "underlying racist" motivations that are the standard fall-back trope of the congenitally stupid MSNBC crowd.



I find it particularly interesting that we're having a fairly vigorous to-do about income inequality at precisely the moment that leftist political fortunes are fading, and fading fast. Krugman even laments that we're not likely to see the political pendulum swing toward passing the left's obscene tax policies until 2024.

But never forget that these people, while bemoaning the corporate excesses of "untrammeled" wealth, are themselves some of the most privileged media and educational insiders in American life. "Pampered" would be putting it much too mildly for these epic hypocrites lounging in the lap of leftist luxury.

Bill Moyers, for example, as Discover the Networks points out, "Has received at least $20 million in taxpayer money from public broadcasting, but refuses to disclose his income." Naturally.

And don't miss this laugh riot report on Paul Krugman at Instapundit, "HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Krugman’s CUNY Sinecure":

Whether or not Krugman’s scholarship and teaching ability warrant such a superior salary is certainly worthy of debate, but the real issue for most commentators is not how much CUNY will pay Krugman, but how little they are asking him to do. CUNY is essentially offering him what used to be called a sinecure. Like ecclesiastical appointments “without the care of souls,” the terms of Krugman’s contract require him to do almost nothing his first year and then teach just one graduate seminar each year for as long as he would like to stay at CUNY. This required teaching in the second year is less than half of the usual course load for most distinguished professors at the Graduate Center, some of whom teach three classes per year and advise several dissertations at a time. Whether Krugman will advise or sit on any dissertation committees remains to be seen.

It is clear from his acceptance email however, that he is interested in doing as little work as possible.

So, kind of like his columns, then.

Heh.

And Krugman's shaking down CUNY for a cool $225,000 annually. Man the barricades!

So, yeah, it's a Marxist renaissance we're in, for sure. The leftist establishment media is definitely in the tank, so be on the lookout for a passel of fawning reviews of Piketty's work in the weeks (perhaps even months) ahead. And then it will all subside and leftists will retreat into their collectivist fortress, working feverishly on their next attack on salt-of-the-earth Americans. It's depraved, I know. But a patriot's day is never done. Just keep exposing these hypocritical hacks for all they're worth, which not surprisingly is quite a bit.

Thomas Piketty's Capital is #1 Best Selling Book on Amazon

According to Emily Cohn on Twitter.

As noted, the book's stirring quite a hubbub.

I stopped by Barnes and Noble yesterday, at the Tustin store, but didn't see the book available.

Don't know if I'll need it. At this point I've pretty much got most of the argument down. Leftists are literally creaming over it. And there's going to be lots more jizz going forward. But who knows? Maybe I'll order a copy.

In any case, if you're so inclined, check Amazon: Capital in the Twenty-First Century.

Thomas Piketty Revives Marx for the 21st Century - UPDATED!

From Daniel Shuchman, at WSJ:

Thomas Piketty likes capitalism because it efficiently allocates resources. But he does not like how it allocates income. There is, he thinks, a moral illegitimacy to virtually any accumulation of wealth, and it is a matter of justice that such inequality be eradicated in our economy. The way to do this is to eliminate high incomes and to reduce existing wealth through taxation.

"Capital in the Twenty-First Century" is Mr. Piketty's dense exploration of the history of wages and wealth over the past three centuries. He presents a blizzard of data about income distribution in many countries, claiming to show that inequality has widened dramatically in recent decades and will soon get dangerously worse. Whether or not one is convinced by Mr. Piketty's data—and there are reasons for skepticism, given the author's own caveats and the fact that many early statistics are based on extremely limited samples of estate tax records and dubious extrapolation—is ultimately of little consequence. For this book is less a work of economic analysis than a bizarre ideological screed.

Heh.

Well, it's only "bizarre" if you're a regular American who understands how markets work (and who doesn't covet what they haven't themselves earned).

But keep reading.

See also Clive Crook's takedown, "The Most Important Book Ever Is All Wrong."

UPDATE: Don't miss this, "Bill Moyers and Paul Krugman Use Thomas Piketty's Capital to Attack America's 'Ugliness' and 'Racism'."

Here's More on Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century

From Steven Erlanger, at the New York Times, "Taking On Adam Smith (and Karl Marx)."

And ICYMI, "The Misguided Resurgence of Marxist Collectivism."

The Misguided Resurgence of Marxist Collectivism

Last October, far-left columnist Michelle Goldberg published a paean to the current Marxist renaissance at the Tablet: "A Generation of Intellectuals Shaped by 2008 Crash Rescues Marx From History’s Dustbin."

I don't think it was the crash of '08 so much as eight years of George W. Bush that gave rise to a new generation of Marxist intellectuals and their shock-troop communist wannabes on the hardline left. And more than anything, the election of Barack Obama in 2008 --- the most radical president in American history --- provided the left with an American leader so steeped in hard-left ideology as to lift the spirits of even the most crestfallen Trotskyite revolutionary.

But that was over five years ago, and the promise of a new emancipatory progressivism --- if not the full realization of a renascent Marxian socio-economic state apparatus ---  appears to be fading amid the self-inflicting overreach of the Democrat Party, not to mention the return to earth of the "lightworker" and the attendant hopes for the Utopian collectivist transformation.

But leftists are nothing if not persistent.

Enter Ross Douthat and his extremely perceptive piece, at the New York Times, "Marx Rises Again" (via Memeorandum). Read it all at the link. Douthat's largely commenting on the lengthy essay at the Nation, from historian Timothy Shenk, "Thomas Piketty and Millennial Marxists on the Scourge of Inequality." (It's probably over 6,000 words long, although I waded through to the end in any case. Shenk's an overly sympathetic correspondent, for he's clearly excited at the prospect of decisive machinations against the evils of inequality, particularly against the reviled capitalists of the ostensibly rapacious and unjust top 1 percent.)

All the hubbub here is over the new book from the French scholar Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century. It turns out Piketty's currently on a book tour stateside, and the New York Times has a gushing report, "Economist Receives Rock Star Treatment." And here's what's raising the hopes of the next generation of revolutionaries:

At the book’s center is Mr. Piketty’s contention — contrary to the influential theory developed by Simon Kuznets in the 1950s and ’60s — that mature capitalist economies do not inevitably evolve toward greater economic equality. Instead, Mr. Piketty contends, the data reveals a deeper historical tendency for the rate of return on capital to outstrip the overall rate of economic growth, leading to greater and greater concentrations of wealth at the very top.

Despite this inevitable-seeming drift toward “patrimonial capitalism” that his charts seemed to show, Mr. Piketty rejected any economic determinism. “It all depends on what the political system decides,” he said.

Such statements, along with Mr. Piketty’s proposal for a progressive wealth tax and income tax rates up to 80 percent, have aroused strong interest among those eager to recapture the momentum of the Occupy movement. The Nation ran a nearly 10,000-word cover article placing his book within a rising tide of neo-Marxist thought, while National Review Online dismissed it as confirmation of the left’s “dearest ‘Das Kapital’ fantasies.”

Here's the National Review piece, from James Pethokoukis, "The New Marxism, Part Two." (Also, "The New Marxism.")

Needless to say, Piketty's rising star rests on the obvious fact that he's given the badly ailing intellectual left new legs to stand on, so to speak. If the inequality of capitalism is not in fact a temporal phenomenon, but is instead a condition inherent and ineradicable to the long-term development of the capitalist order, then enemies of free markets can rekindle their centuries-long leveling campaign against the despised capitalist ruling classes. It's no surprise that prominent collectivists such as Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman have taken to harumphing Piketty's far-left bona fides (see Krugman's review at the New York Review, "Why We’re in a New Gilded Age"). Indeed, the academic radicals at Crooked Timber are positively giddy at the publication of Piketty's tome:

We’re hoping to have a proper book event on Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century in due course. That’s hard for those of us who have read it, because the book is so stimulating, so bursting with surprising facts and ideas [!!!], that there’s a lot to talk about.

The obvious problem, of which Douthat only partly addresses, is that as much as Piketty distances himself from orthodox Marxism and the practical program of state collectivism of the Soviet Union under Marxism-Leninism (apparently Piketty rejects the Marxist label, in favor of the more sober sounding title of "political economist"), the left's statist model has been tried many times before. No matter how you slice it, the various iterations of collectivist command economies do not outperform economies organized more toward the free movement of goods, capital, and people. The heavier the state's hand on the economy, the less economic dynamism of the state over time. Indeed, Sweden --- the classic example of the Scandinavian model of heavy taxation in furtherance of a robust, cradle-to-grave social safety net --- has relinquished much state power in favor of free market mechanisms and private-sector solutions. And don't even get me going about France, where Socialist President François Hollande's proposal for a 75 percent tax on the wealthy has Frenchmen "fleeing the country in despair."

But high taxes and wealth confiscation are the exact policy proposals offered in Capital in the Twenty-First Century. No matter. Leftists are persistent, if anything. Who cares if confiscatory policies have been tried even of late and failed? Forward to full communism!

So to summarize, Piketty's book, for all it's purported pathbreaking research and data-aggregation, just recycles tired old tropes of Marxist and socialist collectivism dating back hundreds of years. Frankly, scholars like this, and their eager-beaver acolytes and hangers-on, are the cross the rest of us have to bear. Leftists can invent new names and repackage old ideological paradigms, but the dead hand of Old Man Marx offers little for the real problems of inequality facing the advanced countries today. Real reform, indeed, must begin not at the level of the nation state but at the level of communities. The American welfare state today is shackling generations of the poor and putting out of reach the very economic mobility that has been the central promise of the American dream. Leftists only want to continue to destroy that dream. Piketty's work is just the latest weapon to be raised by the proletarian mobs against the reviled owners and producers of wealth and (inevitably) broadly shared prosperity.