Too Young For the Communism Debates...
And thus still a communist. The
New York Times gushes:
Thomas Piketty turned 18 in 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell, so he was spared the tortured, decades-long French intellectual debate about the virtues and vices of communism.
Yes, I'm sure he was. Unless his parents were commies themselves. DOH!:
Mr. Piketty — pronounced pee-ket-ee — grew up in a political home, with
left-wing parents who were part of the 1968 demonstrations that turned
traditional France upside down. Later, they went off to the Aude, deep
in southern France, to raise goats. His parents are not a topic he wants
to discuss.
Fair enough; does he want to talk about the goats? Actually he wants to talk about the usual Marxism that he was too young to debate:
As for the Gulf War, it showed him that “governments can do a lot in
terms of redistribution of wealth when they want.” The rapid
intervention to force Saddam Hussein to unhand Kuwait and its oil was a
remarkable show of concerted political will, Mr. Piketty said. “If we
are able to send one million troops to Kuwait in a few months to return
the oil, presumably we can do something about tax havens.”
Wasn't he 20 or 21 during the first Gulf War? Suddenly he's old enough to learn lessons, whereas the fall of the Soviet Union taught him nothing? And what does he suggest we do about tax havens; invade them?
The rest of the article goes on to decry income inequality. Paul ($225,000 a year to not lecture at NYU) Krugman:
Paul Krugman, winner of the Nobel in economic science and a columnist
for The New York Times, wrote that it “will be the most important
economics book of the year — and maybe of the decade.” Remarkably for a
book on such a weighty topic, it has already entered The New York
Times’s best-seller list.
I'm going to make a guess that the author is not going to donate his royalties to pay the bills of the less fortunate, and thus strike a blow against income inequality.
