Now that the first round of intellectual debris left in the wake of French economist Thomas Piketty’s explosive best-seller “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” has begun to settle, it may be time to look more closely at the gaping hole it has left not only in political-economic analysis but also in conventional political strategy. After Piketty documented long-running trends that have turned over ever-increasing shares of national income to the owners of capital at the expense of the vast majority, the best solution he could muster was what he termed a utopian idea: a global tax on capital. Liberal economists, for their part, have largely rolled out the usual list of progressive tax reforms, often conveniently forgetting to confront the extraordinary political obstacles that stand in the way of any one policy remotely powerful enough to tackle the forces Piketty documents.
What forces, you may ask? How about the fact that a mere 400 people at the top now own as much wealth — or capital, in Piketty’s inclusive formulation covering stocks, bonds, businesses, land and any other significant asset — as the bottom 180 million Americans. The best we have been offered in response to this medieval pattern is the vague hope that a cycle of history may one day bring progressive policy back in vogue. Or that demographic shifts may not only allow the election of Democrats but also award them sufficient power to effect trend-altering change rather than modest reforms that utterly fail to divert the steady and ongoing allocation of the nation’s income to those who own capital or work cheek by jowl for them.
