Extracts from a column by Paul Klugman, The New York Times, April 25
Capital in the Twenty-First Century, the new book by the French economist Thomas Piketty, is a bona fide phenomenon. Other books on economics have been best sellers, but Mr. Piketty’s contribution is serious, discourse-changing scholarship in a way most best sellers aren’t. And conservatives are terrified.
Mr. Piketty is hardly the first economist to point out that we are experiencing a sharp rise in inequality, or even to emphasize the contrast between slow income growth for most of the population and soaring incomes at the top. It’s true that Mr. Piketty and his colleagues have added a great deal of historical depth to our knowledge, demonstrating that we really are living in a new Gilded Age. But we’ve known that for a while.
No, what’s really new about Capital is the way it demolishes that most cherished of conservative myths, the insistence that we’re living in a meritocracy in which great wealth is earned and deserved.
So what’s a conservative, fearing that this diagnosis might be used to justify higher taxes on the wealthy, to do? He could try to refute Mr. Piketty in a substantive way, but, so far, I’ve seen no sign of that happening. Instead, as I said, it has been all about name-calling.
It has been amazing to watch conservatives, one after another, denounce Mr. Piketty as a Marxist. Even Mr. Pethokoukis, who is more sophisticated than the rest, calls Capital a work of “soft Marxism,” which only makes sense if the mere mention of unequal wealth makes you a Marxist. (And maybe that’s how they see it: recently former Senator Rick Santorum denounced the term “middle class” as “Marxism talk,” because, you see, we don’t have classes in America.)
And The Wall Street Journal’s review, predictably, goes the whole distance, somehow segueing from Mr. Piketty’s call for progressive taxation as a way to limit the concentration of wealth – a remedy as American as apple pie, once advocated not just by leading economists but by mainstream politicians, up to and including Teddy Roosevelt – to the evils of Stalinism. Is that really the best The Journal can do? The answer, apparently, is yes.
Now, the fact that apologists for America’s oligarchs are evidently at a loss for coherent arguments doesn’t mean that they are on the run politically. Money still talks – indeed, thanks in part to the Roberts court, it talks louder than ever. Still, ideas matter too, shaping both how we talk about society and, eventually, what we do. And the Piketty panic shows that the right has run out of ideas.
Piketty panic? Maybe… but “the fact that apologists for America’s oligarchs are evidently at a loss for coherent arguments doesn’t mean that they are on the run politically.”
C.S. Lewis, in The Screwtape Letters, 1942, has a handle on this. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3MWVMKKY3A .
We’re more likely to see coherent suppression of the conditions that enable coherent argument, and that nurture its influence in our political life. [Name some....]
And, as a way to do this, we’re likely to see instead more purposeful flooding of our mentality with fast turnover sense stimuli and emotion triggers that keep revving the personal and tribal survival circuits we evolved earlier. Our instinctive fast-response systems.
The scenario of a class-based widening of wealth inequality eluded to above can be visualized in policy terms as that of ‘punctuated equilibrium’, whereby the conditions precipitating a sudden break from the status quo must first attain a threshold level and reach the ‘tipping point’.
Elaborating ‘a new way of looking at inequality’ ala Pickett is one thing,
smacking ‘America’s oligarchs’ with higher taxes, as Krugman implies, or, more radically, ‘smashing’ the financial oligarchy, as ‘Marxian talk’ would have it, is quite another. What or who stands in the way and for how long?