Piketty Dikitty Rikitty | James Howard Kunstler

[Tace]

James Howard Kunstler -- World News Trust

April 28, 2014

The debate over Thomas Piketty’s new book Capital in the Twenty-First Century is as dumb as every other issue-set in the public arena these days -- a product of failed mental models, historical blindness, hubris, and wishful thinking.

Piketty’s central idea is that wealth will continue to accumulate and concentrate among individual rich families at ever-greater rates and therefore that nation-states should take a number of steps to prevent that from happening or at least attempt to correct it.

The first mistake of Piketty fans such as New York Times op-ed ass Paul Krugman is the assumption that the dynamic labeled “capitalism” is an ism, a belief system that you can subscribe to or drop out of, depending on your political correctitude. That’s just not true. So-called capitalism is more like gravity, a set of laws that apply to and describe the behavior of surplus wealth, in particular wealth generated by industrial societies, which is to say unprecedented massive wealth. The human race never saw anything quite like it before. It became both a moral embarrassment and a political inconvenience. So among the intellectual grandiosities of modern times is the idea that this massive wealth can be politically managed to produce an ideal equitable society -- with no side effects.

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http://worldnewstrust.com/piketty-dikitty-rikitty-james-howard-kunstler

[yallerdawg]

1. Kunstler is acknowledging history

Humanity seems to require violence to create social change.

Our present class warfare is as simple as kill the poor or eat the rich. Kill the poor is winning today.

We must insist we live in a Democracy and can peacefully transition to an equitable state.

Peaceful would be historical change. And Kunstler doesn't seem to consider peaceful likely.

History.

[yurbud]

2. we need to rebalance the rewards for work and creativity as opposed to capital

if workers kept more of the wealth they created, we could all work less, live better, have more to spend, and create a more stable society.

Instead, as we become more productive, the excess wealth is skimmed off the top by the 1% (more like the 1% of the 1% of the 1%).

Democrats could have partly done this by passing card check or even repealed Taft-Hartley as soon as Obama was elected and had both chambers of Congress, which would have had a stimulus effect on the economy as well.

[MisterP]

3. the party that expressed its relief once they LOST a seat from Massachusetts?

[yurbud]

4. I missed the expression of relief, but it's not hard to believe

[MisterP]

5. found it! (though it's more "now the heat's off" more than explicit bipartisan collusion)

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x7523618
synchronicity leaves no fingerprints