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Piketty Rejects Award: "It's Not Government's Role To Decide Honorability," Just Everything Else
The author of what Paul Krugman called "the most important economics book of the year - and maybe the decade," has turned down a prestigious award from the French government because, he does "not think it is the government's role to decide who is honorable." The irony of Thomas Piketty's revulsion at the Legion d'Honneur award is juxtaposed with his socialist epithets that government should decide everything else... like confiscatory taxes, big government, and, as Mish perfectly describes it, the "save the local bookstore mentality." Even more ironic though, Piketty's rejection of the award occurred on the same day that Hollande finbally gave up on his 75% supertax scheme (which has led to record unemployment).
Everything you need to know about Piketty's 696-page manifesto in 3 minutes...
And (via Mish), Harvard Busines Review's brief synopsis:
The argument. Capital (which by Piketty’s definition is pretty much the same thing as wealth) has tended over time to grow faster than the overall economy. Income from capital is invariably much less evenly distributed than labor income. Together these amount to a powerful force for increasing inequality.
The method. Piketty does not offer his own theory of what drives economic growth, or what the optimal ratio of capital to labor income might be. In fact, a recurring theme of his book is that the theory-first approach of modern economics is a dead-end.
The evidence. The richest source of data for the book is France, thanks to the country’s long tradition of excellent record-keeping and an estate tax that was enacted a couple of years after the 1789 Revolution. What the French numbers show is that the ratio of capital to income remained steady at about seven-to-one for centuries, plummeted around the start of World War I, and began recovering after World War II.
Piketty argues that the U.S. should consider a return to a “confiscatory” (his word) 80% top marginal tax rate even though it wouldn’t bring in much money (he basically agrees with Arthur Laffer on that), well, that provokes some thoughts, doesn’t it?
And so the irony of turning down an award for this reason:
“I refuse this nomination because I do not think it is the government’s role to decide who is honourable.”
When the over-reaching policy prescriptions of the French 'economist' are nothing short of government-uber-alles seems hypocritical at best.
As The FT reports, he is not the first to turn it down...
In rejecting the Legion of Honour, Mr Piketty joins a list of personalities that includes Claude Monet, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Hector Berlioz and Brigitte Bardot — all of whom declined the award for varying reasons.
The Legion of Honour was first established by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1802 and is considered the country’s highest award. In 2012, Mr Hollande became Grandmaster of the order, continuing the long tradition of placing the incumbent French leader at the head.
But the irony grows...
In a clear indictment of Mr Hollande’s economic record, Mr Piketty added that the government instead “would do better to concentrate on reviving growth in France and Europe”.
Mr Piketty’s comments come on top of a series of disappointing performances and false dawns on the economic front ever since Mr Hollande and his socialist government took office.
Unemployment has remained persistently high in spite of promises to change the upward trend by the end of last year. Meanwhile, sluggish growth — the economy was stagnant for the first six months of 2014 — has helped drag down Mr Hollande’s popularity to the lowest levels of any French president in modern history.
But the rejection of the award by the French economist is particularly galling coming on the same day that the French president dumped his supertax scheme for the rich. The measure to increase tax rates to 75 per cent on earnings over €1m, which earned Mr Hollande support from the left when he announced the plan to great fanfare in 2012, was on Thursday abandoned after bringing in just a small portion of the expected revenue.
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and in pictures...
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Piketty is a jackass
Anagram of Paul Krugman is "Gunk Up Alarm"...
Too funny.
my co-worker's ex-wife makes $84 every hour on the internet . She has been laid off for six months but last month her check was $18827 just working on the internet for a few hours. go to this website... www.works3.com
It's a Trap!
So if anyone was loooking for proof he's a communist scum, there u have it. Even named the book after one by Marx.
France has 5th highest global GDP, and promotes 4 day work week. US may be #1, not so much re QOL.
Freedom fries!
Your false assumption: The less work, the higher the QOL.
Indeed, work is for plebs.
"When, in 1953, Chou En Lai, the Chinese Prime Minister, was in Geneva for the peace negotiations to end the Korean war, a French journalist asked him what does he think about the French Revolution; Chou replied: “It is still too early to tell.” In a way, he was right: with the disintegration of the “people’s democracies” in the late 1990s, the struggle for the historical place of the French Revolution flared up again. The liberal revisionists tried to impose the notion that the demise of Communism in 1989 occurred at exactly the right moment: it marked the end of the era which began in 1789, the final failure of the statist-revolutionary model which first entered the scene with the Jacobins."
— Slavoj Zizek, Robespierre or the “Divine Violence” of Terror
dickhead.
The elites just love this kind of debate over the "-isms"; it's an endless merry-go-round that keeps the sheeples bleating but corralled.
Meanwhile, their banks and corporations are bailed out via the public treasury and their crimes ignored by the law.
Crumbs are scattered for the lower classes as the middle class is bled dry; and immigrants are allowed to stream in to confound both.
and all this while the non-elites fervently believe the elites are united in purpose, instead of constantly quarreling with each other?
-isms are abstractions, but their application isn't
gee how honourable of him, a token anti establishment gesture from someone who just wrote a book supplying all the required intellectual support the establishment requires to justify its ongoing plunder.
His treatise lamenting consolidation surely included a critique of central banking? A book of the decade on the subject of wealth must have. Krugy, please coordinate????
You'll get nothing but crickets chirping for that insightful comment.
Plus one ;-)
yeah, it's funny (as in tragi-comic funny)...these defenders of the common man never append demands for the end of labor (income) taxes, never raise a peep about parasitic debt based currencies (central banks) or confiscatory property taxes (real property). sure, proto-commies, i'll buy-in to an aggressive tax on paper wealth (80, 90...hell, 99%) so long as you drop the planks from your loathsome manifesto. you don't want the workers of the world to unite, you want to suck their blood till they go tits-up in the grave.
death to taxes on labor (productive endeavors that provide goods & services people actually want), property (chattels & real estate) and currencies (inflation) and all those who support such pernicious policies!
death to all communists! i'm sick of your blathering and this endless 3-card monty...you keep rebranding the same wicked scheme every decade or so. we're hip to the jive, fools. and so we, the people, will 'tax' your ill-gotten gains and have you collared with heavy chains.
Christ said, "those who have mercy shall obtain it." and by the same token, those who haven't any for their fellow man shall get all the less of it. shit, 'oligarchs', i'll rip little dolly from your sweet lil daughters hands, toss it into the bin and sell her to some tribe of bedoins. i know how you feel about janus; now it's time you know how he feels about you vermin.
"the last shall be first; and the first shall be last"
janus
I raise that question with God nearly every day. "the last shall be first;
and the first shall be last". I wonder where God is on that Biblical verse
everytime I think of large investment houses and CEO pay structure?
As an Anglican, and one well versed with the King James version of the Bible, that particular verse seems to occupy most of my attention of late. Millions upon millions of people are unemployed in the Western World. Millions of Americans are on 'food stamps' and not one dime of printed stimulus went towards small business loans or investment in infrastructure. All the stimulus over the last six years has gone to Wall Street alone. How is it that Blankfein and Goldman Sachs is _always_ first, God?
+ many. But I suspect that this book about philosophy of government has more in it about central banking than his treatise. Like this pearl "You cannot have both central banking and decentralized government, you must pick one or the other." http://www.amazon.com/Localism-Philosophy-Government-Mark-Moore/dp/06922...
Thanks for the link. I can always learn something. Besides, I don't wanna catch any of that Dunning Kruger syndrome that's supposedly going around ZH. It sounds pretty bad. Still, an honest application of system theory leads one to the same conclusion as the quote from the book. But progs don't do maff, dey do feelings, and ya gotta admit from the hoopla surrounding Piketty's book that it's lucrative.
Oh crap, I completely missed that logical contradiction in my reflections.
Great catch!!!
Picketty is correct in not accepting an award from the government. No academic with self respect should.
He is also correct that wealth inequality is excacerbated by the gap between income generated from labor and income generated from capital. You can't really argue against it. When you tax capital gains at a much lower rate than labor income, obviously those with capital (the wealthy) are going to grow wealth faster given the same time period. This is why Buffet and Obama pay 10% effective in taxes and I pay upwards of 40%.
In any case, taxes exist. His argument to tax higher income is not "government uber alles" any more than traditional taxation is. The fact that it's more for some makes little difference philosophically. If his suggestion is to increase capital gains on the wealthy to 80% and reduce everyone else to 10% is that more or less uber alles?
exacerbated != caused
Agree. In a normal system rates and risk would throttle capital income. But in a system such as ours, there is no risk. Frankly, capital investment is now not only not risky, it's a guaranteed gain. Why? Government intervention, graft, and cronyism. This is the factor nearly all economists miss, because it can't be measured or incorporated in models. But that's the world we now live in. There is no risk of losing an initial investment, or even losing money over projected gains.
What bothers me about many of the statements here is that somehow it's more socialistic if high taxes are applied to the rich. Why is that more socialistic than raising my taxes as a middle class income earner? Let me tell you why: because the wealthy and oligarchs create propaganda that make it so. Raising taxes on the rich is "redistributive", and an act of jealousy, while raising taxes on the middle class or poor is just SOP. Meanwhile, those activities are directly in support of war, asset prices and jacking up the assets of the wealthy.
Our system is so bastardized and fucked up, that this is all very hard to pull apart. Really, fixing the nature of riskless investments would be a better approach, and also cracking down heavily on corruption. 80% taxation on upper incomes is nothing but a patch over these other root causes.
"What bothers me about many of the statements here is that somehow it's more socialistic if high taxes are applied to the rich. Why is that more socialistic than raising my taxes as a middle class income earner? Let me tell you why: because the wealthy and oligarchs create propaganda that make it so."
Quite right.
Apparently all it takes for higher "taxation of the middle class" is a simple photo-op with some guys in white lab coats to present the illusion they are doctors, so the crowd goes into an absolute socialistic fever pitch that they simply must personally line the pockets of every pharma and health insurance company executive in America!!!
Ain't democracy grand ;-)
As a further lesson heres an explanation of propoganda:
The use of propoganda is meant to bring a complex issue to light via simpler means not through lies or deception but through images and language the "common" man might understand. To "propogandize" a lie is to simplify that lie in the same fashion and therefore becomes the ultimate poison, the ultimate lie.
The use of the word has become poisoned by the great liars, as with virtually all modern propoganda for the jews are masters of the art of "spin doctoring".
The "exceptional" thing about America is, we get to choose what we believe, its not forced upon us.
So if you want to believe a black male national-socialist/Muslim (Obama) and a white male crony-socialist/Mormon (Reid) and a white female crony-socialist/Catholic (Pelosi) are dumber than jooos, one certainly can.
And no one loses their head ;-)
base, there's another alternative: Eliminate the income tax. I know, i know, i'm told we can't because we're trying to run a civilization here. Or some such nonsense. As if civility and the existence of this royalty on labor are a bijective ordered pair. They're not: so Piketty's remedy is bullshit. As to the award, i suppose justice was served in the end. All that research essentially wasted so he could position himself to recco Robin Hood. I agree with him that it's best he and the award remain a disjoint ordered pair.
" there's another alternative: Eliminate the income tax. "
Are return to tariffs, an elimination of vast bureaucracies and standing armies; and better: BOTH.
I would much rather have a direct democracy with direct funding of voting block choices exclusively by the voters in favor of those choices.
IF persons wish to pool resources without coercion then so be it.
Proggies have long run goals, why can't anyone else? I don't share their goals at all, but I'm not ashamed to steal their playbook: baby steps. So to your point on direct funding, I've often thought the income tax return should at least have a flip side so I as the taxpayer can apply the funds I contribute to each category (and both sides naturally, would have to balance). Let Congress take a break from the budgeting, they work *cough* screw us so hard on everything else.
" I've often thought the income tax return should at least have a flip side so I as the taxpayer can apply the funds I contribute to each category (and both sides naturally, would have to balance). "
Indeed. This is just the kind of arrangement what I would consider appropriate as an expression of direct democracy.
The politics of economic choice: vote with your wallet!
"Really, fixing the nature of riskless investments would be a better approach, and also cracking down heavily on corruption. 80% taxation on upper incomes is nothing but a patch over these other root causes. "
Agreed. YOU & I can see this quite clearly.
The fact that Piketty completely avoids the blindingly obvious real issues at the root of the growth of inequality cannot be stressed enough. He isn't offering a remedy; he is merely practicing yet another variation on class warfare Cloward-Piven strategies.
Piketty's entire discourse is a very elaborate exorcise in twisting the narrative for the purpose of circumventing discussion of obvious causations of inequality.
Inequal applications of the Law -be it the perverse tax code or the perverted machinations of the criminal justice system-, are the very basis of an inequal society.
How can this asshole act like he can't see what is right in front of him? -It's his fucking job to alter the terms of the discourse and to bamboozle with bullshit when the subject cannot be changed altogether..
Piketty's whole narrative is a classic deflection and manipulation strategy: he is a shill for oligarchy clothed in neo-socialist and neo-chartalist rhetoric.
His 80% proposal triggers my automatic taxation bullshit filter.
It's really simple, and was shared with me by my accountant. Anyone that talks about tax rates is spewing bullshit. One page of the tax code is the rates, 20,000 pages are the definition of income, care to guess in which of those two the inequality lies?
"Anyone that talks about tax rates is spewing bullshit. One page of the tax code is the rates, 20,000 pages are the definition of income, care to guess in which of those two the inequality lies? "
Indeed.
If Krugman says he is important he must be negligeable (by ricochet).
I laud his (Piketty's) ethics as much as I laud his work.
"Piketty: "It's Not Government's Role To Decide Honorability. " "
I am JOYOUS: the damned fool Piketty is self destructing.
With ONE SINGLE CARELESS SENTANCE OF ONLY SEVEN WORDS Piketty fully contradicts ALL of his own assertions and arguments about the role of Governments.
Piketty did not even bother to distinguish between types of Governments: this was a blanket statement!
You can all save the 3 minutes just by knowing his book is 696 pages
A Zionist evaluation of economics is a lot like what a bank robber's evaluation of a local bank branch is. Piketty's book can rightfully be called a Zionist's casing of the world economy.
It is a tome written to justify the theft of what is left to be stolen by way of a global (World Order) redistribution tax on wealth. I.e. a tax on the middle-class for more soul destroying welfare and dependence for the poor and more lucre for the elites.
There is no wonder that Zionist Krugman loves it.
The banksters need to repay us.
Time for a global redistribution of heads.
The wealthy own capital, but the less wealthy employ that capital.
The returns on that capital, and the labor used to employ it, can only be undermined via direct theft, taxes, and indirect theft, inflation, "printing," by the banksters.
In such an environment, the only way to become wealthy, become wealthier, or stay wealthy is to place oneself as close to power, and/or the banksters' "printing" presses as possible--tyranny and exploitation.
The banksters need to repay us.
"Gold, silver, and heads accepted in payment."
Hell, take the head first, the other thing follow. Milestones
Piketty is a douche...he and Krugman are peas in a pod.
But you gotta hand it to goofy Hollande...he's banged some hotties.
You've spotted the no.1 reason some of these dorks get into politics
The return on capital is higher than the return on labor... So tax labor. -- Piketty.
Government gives him award for saying increase taxes.
Rinse, wash, repeat.
Was there ever a "tax labor less" moment? Like maybe "get rid of the income tax" thought? Nope.
"The return on capital is higher than the return on labor... So tax labor. -- Piketty.
Government gives him award for saying increase taxes. " ...ON LABOR
Precisely. Shill for Oligarchy.
Piketty argues for further expropriation of the gains in productivity exclusively from Labor.
-Labor which has been being robbed of Productivity gains for over 30 years already.
Give it to Barky.
He can put it next to his Nobel Peace Toy.
I got this f... book from Pickety this Xmas. I read the first pages and realized it was perhaps one of the worst economics books ever. I then thought the following: I can either sell it on Ebay to make some money or burn it. If I burn it, I will be like those I have so much hated and feared all my life. If I sell it, I will make someone else read it and propagate the heresy. If I keep it with me, it will take space in my book shelf. What should I do?
Well you asked, so here goes: force yourself to read and evaluate every word; then burn it.
Note: I almost forgot: question the motives of the gift giver, might also provide some new insight.
"What should I do? "
Find a good creative use for the book!
Make paper airplanes or party hats.
Paper mache.
Wrap up some fresh fish.
Plugging rat holes.
Door stop.
Press flowers between the pages.
Goats like to eat paper.
Lining the bird cage.
I'm sure that there are many other good ideas that I haven't thought of beyond shoving the book up a random economist's ass.
European and US history are very different.
In Europe we still have an aristocracy of very rich people whose families have been bone idle for centuries. This wealth is just inherited and not earned.
So taxing the rich falls on much more receptive ears within Europe.
The US was a new country where everything was up for grabs (Europe had been carved up centuries ago and was now mostly in the hands of a small elite).
The US was a land of opportunity where anyone could make it to the top.
But now the US is starting to look like old Europe; all the land is owned by a few families and it is forming it's own Aristocracy.
This Aristocracy will be just the same as the old European one and get used to living off inherited wealth and do evrything possible to ensure they survive in the luxury thay have become accustomed to.
In Europe the battle to spread wealth out from the few to the many has been going on for millennia.
The Magna Carta (on which the US constitution is based) was the first step in barons taking power away from an absolute monarch.
Since then we have had an aristocracy that has held on to wealth and power and only in the last century have we chipped away at their money and power for the common good.
The US is now formimg it's aristocracy and maybe one of these families will dominate and you will live history backwards to create an absolute monarch.
The US is going backwards compared to Europe, wake up.
In the Uk our rich list is topped by the Duke of Westminster, a member of the old aristocracy who did absolutely nothing to earn this wealth.
Not surprisingly, we don't see all wealth as being earned.
We still have our old aristocracy and want to see it getting smaller not bigger.
There are already 2 contenders:
Jamie I (Dimon)
or
Lloyd I (Blankfein)
long may they reign over you ....
Obviously. Hayek was a member of the European Aristocracy and not a self made man.
Hayek "I don't want to lose my inherited wealth in taxes, how do I sell this to the masses?"
"Now Governments keep chipping away at wealth and power of my Aristocratic friends and I, so Governments are bad. We of course are good"
The birth of the Austrian school in economics.
Inherited wealth is the enemy of a meritocratic society.
If you are going to succeed through your own hard work, drive and ambition, there is no room for inheritance.
An old Aristocrat like Hayek would never come to this conclusion though - it would not be in his self-interest.
Inherited wealth is the enemy of a meritocratic society.
If you are going to succeed through your own hard work, drive and ambition, there is no room for inheritance.
It's amazing how paranoid elitists get with Piketty's argument on income inequality, which is pretty much correct and obvious, no matter what school of thought you come from. Don't like what the guy says, so poo-poo him in any way you can?
Is it irony or spitting at someone against the wind?
He so wertfrei.
Thomas Piketty is crazy to think that large inequalities in wealth undermine democracy. Why, the founding fathers were all rich, and American citizenship was always granted on equal terms without any large classes of people excluded from basic rights from the very second the Constitution was ratified
Has anyone actually read Piketty?