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'."