#piketty

[toastyslayingbutter]

I read all of Piketty’s Capital on the train everyday from Brooklyn, NY to Emerson, NJ and I have virtually no recollection of the book itself lmao.

I remember the basic premise of growth and inequality, but nothing beyond that.

It’s due for a re-read, but man Piketty sucks on a personal level.

[goorlandouniverse]

Der organische Kapitalismus

Eine Methodik zur globalen Ungleichheitsbekämpfung Einführung Die Geschichte des Kapitalismus ist eine Geschichte der gesellschaftlichen Entwicklung. Wurden zu Beginn lediglich Gold- und Silberstücke zu einer Münze geformt und mit entsprechenden Wappen gekennzeichnet vereinfachten die Münzen den bislang üblichen Tauschhandel. Aus den Münzen wurde mit der Zeit und dem gesellschaftlichen Wandel…

[ferrolano-blog]

Cómo democratizar el poder económico: las propuestas de “socialismo participativo” en Piketty.

[teledyn]

Thomas Piketty's 'Capital'… in 3 minutes

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Of course we can tax billionaires

On OCTOBER 23 at 7PM, I'll be in DECATUR, presenting my novel THE BEZZLE at EAGLE EYE BOOKS.

Billionaires are pretty confident that they can't be taxed – not just that they shouldn't be taxed, but rather, that it is technically impossible to tax the ultra-rich. They're not shy about explaining why, either – and neither is their army of lickspittles.

If it's impossible to tax billionaires, then anyone who demands that we tax billionaires is being childish. If taxing billionaires is impossible, then being mad that we're not taxing billionaires is like being mad at gravity.

Boy is this old trick getting old. It was already pretty thin when Margaret Thatcher rolled it out, insisting that "there is no alternative" to her program of letting the rich get richer and the poor go hungry. Dressing up a demand ("stop trying to think of alternatives") as a scientific truth ("there is no alternative") sets up a world where your opponents are Doing Ideology, while you're doing science.

Billionaires basically don't pay tax – that's a big part of how they got to be billionaires:

https://www.propublica.org/series/the-secret-irs-files

By cheating on their taxes, they get to keep – and invest – more money than less-rich people (who get to keep more money than regular people and poor people, obvs). They get so much money that they can "invest" it in corrupting the political process, for example, by flushing vast sums of dark money into elections to unseat politicians who care about finance crime and replace them with crytpo-friendly lawmakers who'll turn a blind eye to billionaires' scams:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/10/14/silicon-valley-the-new-lobbying-monster

Once someone gets rich enough, they acquire impunity. They become too big to fail. They become too big to jail. They become too big to care. They buy presidents. They become president.

A decade ago, Thomas Piketty published his landmark Capital in the 21st Century, tracing three centuries of global capital flows and showing how extreme inequality creates political instability, leading to bloody revolutions and world wars that level the playing field by destroying most of the world's capital in an orgy of violence, with massive collateral damage:

https://memex.craphound.com/2014/06/24/thomas-pikettys-capital-in-the-21st-century/

Piketty argued that unless we taxed the rich, we would attain the same political instability that provoked the World Wars, but in a nuclear-tipped world that was poised on the brink of ecological collapse. He even laid out a program for this taxation, one that took accord of all the things rich people would try to hide their assets.

Today, the destruction that Piketty prophesied is on our doorstep, and all over the world, political will is gathering to do something about our billionaire problem. The debate rages from France to dozen-plus US states that are planning wealth taxes on the ultra-rich.

Wherever that debate takes hold, billionaires and their proxies pop up to tell us that we're Doing Ideology, that there is no alternative, and that it is literally impossible to tax the ultra-rich.

In a new blog post, Piketty deftly demolishes this argument, showing how thin the arguments for the impossibility of a billionaire tax really is:

https://www.lemonde.fr/blog/piketty/2024/10/15/how-to-tax-billionaires/

First, there's the argument that the ultra-rich are actually quite poor. Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg don't have a lot of money, they have a lot of stock, which they can't sell. Why can't they sell their stock? You'll hear a lot of complicated arguments about illiquidity and the effect on the share-price of a large sell-off, but they all boil down to this: if we make billionaires sell a bunch of their stock, they will be poorer.

No duh.

Piketty has an answer to the liquidity crisis of our poormouthing billionaires:

If finding a buyer is challenging, the government could accept these shares as payment for taxes. If necessary, it could then sell these shares through various methods, such as offering employees to purchase them, which would increase their stake in the company.

Though Piketty doesn't say so, billionaires are not actually poor. They have fucktons of cash, which they acquire through something called "buy, borrow, die," which allows them to create intergenerational dynastic wealth for their failsons:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/buy-borrow-die-rich-avoid-140004536.html

Billionaires know they're not poor. They even admit it, when they say, "Okay, but the other reason it's impossible to tax us is that we're richer and therefore more powerful than the governments that want to try it."

Piketty points out the shell-game at the core of this argument: the free movement of money that allows for tax-dodging was created by governments. They made these laws, so they can change them. Governments that can't exercise their sovereign power to tax the wealthy end up taxing the poor, eroding their legitimacy and hence their power. Taxing the rich – a wildly popular move – will make governments more powerful, not less.

Big countries like the US (and federations like the EU) have a lot of power. The US ended Swiss banking secrecy and manages to tax Americans living abroad. There's no reason that France couldn't pass a wealth-tax that applies to people based on their historical residency: a 51 year old French billionaire who decamps to Switzerland to duck a wealth tax after 50 years in France could be held liable for 50/51 of the wealth tax.

The final argument Piketty takes up is the old saw that taxing the rich is illegal, or, if it were made legal, would be unconstitutional. As Piketty says, rich people have taken this position every single time they faced meaningful tax enforcement, and they have repeatedly lost this fight. France has repeatedly levied wealth taxes, as long ago as 1789 and as recently as 1945.

Taxing the ultra-rich isn't like the secret of embalming Pharaohs – it's not a lost art from a fallen civilization. The US top rate of tax in 1944 was 97%. The postwar top rate from 1945-63 was 94%, and it was 70% from 1965-80. These was the period of the largest expansion of the US economy in the nation's history. These are the "good old days" Republicans say they want to return to.

The super-rich keep getting richer. In France, the 500 richest families were worth a combined €200b in 2010. Today, it's €1.2 trillion. No wonder a global wealth tax is at the top of the agenda for next month's G20 Summit in Rio.

Here in the US – where money can easily move across state lines and where multiple states are racing each other to the bottom to be the best onshore-offshore tax- and financial secrecy-haven – state-level millionaire taxes are kicking ass.

Massachusetts's 2024 millionaire tax has raised more than $1.8b, exceeding all expectations (it was originally benchmarked at $1b), by taxing annual income in excess of $1m at an additional 4%:

https://www.boston.com/news/business/2024/05/21/heres-how-much-the-new-massachusetts-millionaires-tax-has-raised-this-year/

This is exactly the kind of tax that billionaires say is impossible. It's so easy to turn ordinary income in sheltered income – realizing it as a capital gain, say – so raising taxes on income will do nothing. Who are you gonna believe, billionaires or the 1.8 billion dead presidents lying around the Massachusetts Department of Revenue?

But say you are worried that taxing ordinary income is a nonstarter because of preferential capital gains treatment. No worry, Washington State has you covered. Its 7% surcharge on capital gains in excess of $250,000 also exceeded all expectations, bringing in $600m more than expected in its first year – a year when the stock market fell by 25%:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/03/when-the-tide-goes-out/#passive-income

Okay, but what if all those billionaires flee your state? Good riddance, and don't let the door hit you on the way out. All we need is an exit tax, like the one in California, which levies a one-time 0.4% tax on net worth over $30m for any individual who leaves the state.

Billionaires are why we can't have nice things – a sensible climate policy, workers' rights, a functional Supreme Court and legislatures that answer to the people, rather than deep-pocketed donors.

The source of billionaires' power isn't mysterious: it's their money. Take away the money, take away the power. With more than a dozen states considering wealth taxes, we're finally in a race to the top, to see which state can attack the corrosive power of extreme wealth most aggressively.

Tor Books as just published two new, free LITTLE BROTHER stories: VIGILANT, about creepy surveillance in distance education; and SPILL, about oil pipelines and indigenous landback.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/15/piketty-pilled/#tax-justice

[deepdrearn]

I'm really sorry for all of you that can't read Dutch bc this is a most precious burn of Thomas Piketty by Willem Schinkel aka "the most radical thinker of the Netherlands "

[huariqueje]

The Players - Lucile Piketty , 2022.

French, b. 1990 -

Oil on canvas , 38 x 46 cm.

[dontmean2bepoliticalbut]

[k-wame]

[oacasodaspalavras]

Thomas Piketty/Claire Alet+Benjamin Adam, Capital e Ideologia, 2023

[churchblogmatics-blog]

Books for political formation

Books that have left an indelible mark on my understanding of politics some way. My political development is unfinished, so this list is unfinished - I'm always open to suggestions

Capital Vol. 1, Karl Marx - unmasks the inherently exploitative social relations embedded within capitalism, critiques capitalism as ineffective/self-destructive (not just immoral)

Capital and Ideology, Thomas Piketty - there is no such thing as a "natural" social order, examines how inequality regimes have emerged and been justified across the world throughout the past 1000 years of history

Nixon Agonistes, Garry Wills - captures a cross-section of American politics over a short period, probing insights into the psychology driving political affinities, documents the evolution of the word "liberal" in American political discourse

What Are We Doing Here?, Marilynne Robinson - provides a constructive, anti-Hobbesian view of society

Poverty, by America, Matthew Desmond - shows the extent to which poverty in America is a policy choice, harm reduction is possible without revolution

The Code of Capital, Katharina Pistor - a cursory overview of the legal strategies to insulate capital from any competing legal claims

Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt - laziness and insistence on self-exoneration is often the psychological engine behind human wickedness and injustice over and above malice

Illness as Metaphor / AIDS and Its Metaphors, Susan Sontag - shows how deeply ingrained prejudicial views of disability is within our collective language and psyche

Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West, Cormac McCarthy - violence has never been excised from politics, the invisibility of violence to the bourgeois is an illusion

Lysistrata, Aristophanes - unmasks the nature of gender politics despite its operation behind closed doors, imagines a project of mass organizing along gender lines

Civilization and Its Discontents, Sigmund Freud - civility is unfortunately a tenuous prospect

Heroes of the Fourth Turning, Will Arbery - excoriates conservative psychological pathologies

Martin Luther King Jr

A Gift of Love - justice is love in public

Letter From a Birmingham Jail - there are contexts where civil disobedience is mandatory for the Christian, solidarity with the marginalized is always mandatory

The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot - progress is not inevitable

William Faulkner

Absalom, Absalom! - racism is an inexorable part of American capitalism, imperialism cannot be stopped until we are able to free ourselves of our disingenuous national myths

The Sound and the Fury - nostalgia makes you an idiot, unable to understand your present or to predict your future

Herman Melville

Billy Budd, Sailor - history is unavoidably malleable

Moby-Dick - a true-believer demagogue is worse than a cynically disingenuous one, democracy can be an ineffective antidote to a tyrant

Franz Kafka

The Trial - the very procedures instilled to protect (or at least mitigate) injustice can also exacerbate it

The Metamorphosis - modernity interferes with our ability to see and relate to others as human, liberalism's self-advocating and individualistic ethic destroys us from the inside out because it forecloses our ability to recognize this

John Milton

Areopagitica - freedom of speech is as much about the individual's freedom to render judgment on speech as it is about the speakers ability to speak, the problem with censorship is the top-down nature of it, not in the governed people's discernment of quality or value

Paradise Lost - similar to Birmingham Jail, the character of Abdiel represents righteous opposition to Earthly principalities

The Autobiography of Malcolm X - the psychological, spiritual, emotional toll that being black in America takes on a person, black empowerment is a necessary step towards black liberation

Ursula LeGuin

The Lathe of Heaven - structural reform can only be undertaken democratically, no change is without trade-offs so changes must be broadly accepted and supported by the populace who will inevitably bear the unforeseen burden that results

The Ones Who Walk Away From the Omelas - shows the extent to which our brains are broken by imperialistic thinking, exploitation is a necessary feature of the worlds we are capable of imagining

[goorlandouniverse]

Der organische Kapitalismus

Eine Methodik zur globalen Ungleichheitsbekämpfung Einführung Die Geschichte des Kapitalismus ist eine Geschichte der gesellschaftlichen Entwicklung. Wurden zu Beginn lediglich Gold- und Silberstücke zu einer Münze geformt und mit entsprechenden Wappen gekennzeichnet vereinfachten die Münzen den bislang üblichen Tauschhandel. Aus den Münzen wurde mit der Zeit und dem gesellschaftlichen Wandel…

[helshades]

par curiosité quels sont les membres du PCF et de la nupes que tu trouves intéressants ? Parce que je suis très souvent en accord avec tes idées et prises de position, alors ça m’intéresse de savoir…

Euuuh...

Sébastien Jumel, voilà :

Il a des cheveux rigolos et il est député des Alpes-Maritimes. Accessoirement, j'aime assez ses prises de position à l'Assemblée, son engagement auprès de ses constituants à l'époque des cahiers de doléances et son soutien aux Gilets-Jaunes.

Fabien Gay, aussi :

Non mais regarde-moi cette bouille ! Sénateur (on sait : la cantine à Gégé est trop bonne.) de Seine-Saint-Denis et directeur de l'Huma. J'aime beaucoup les propositions qu'il a faites et qu'il signe, sur la laïcité, la pénurie de médicaments, la transparence sur le salaire et la retraite des sénateurs, le développement du rail, la lutte contre les violences pornographiques... Je conseille à tout le monde de consulter l'activité parlementaire des députés et sénateurs, d'ailleurs, c'est toujours intéressant de voir de quoi l'on discute au Parlement.

Au sujet de la guerre israélienne actuelle, je note que le groupe parlementaire Gauche Démocrate et Républicaine dont fait partie le P.C.F. s'est illustré par un communiqué honnête et sans ambiguïté en soutien aux civils quels qu'ils soient.

Hubert Wulfranc parce que 1) la moustache, 2) prof d'Histoire-géo, 3) excellentes interventions lors de la réforme des retraites.

Je suis tentée de rajouter Elsa Faucillon qui a notamment bossé sur la question kurde mais elle copine avec Clémentine Autain qui me fait l'effet irrésistible d'un broccoli humain.

Sinon, à part les cocos... Bon, je honnis déjà l'intégralité des Verts, étant pro-nucléaire et pro-chasse (hinhinhin.) mais j'aime beaucoup, beaucoup un membre historique du P.S. qu'est le délicieux, le charmant, l'adorable Gérard Filoche :

Filoche, ce n'est pas un élu mais un militant, et du genre vénère. C'est vrai qu'il s'accroche à son étiquette socialiste comme une bernique à son rocher, mais ça fait un certain plaisir de le savoir exister en marge du P.S. en improbable statue du Commandeur. Ancien inspecteur du Travail, il s'est illustré par son opposition farouche autant que pédagogique à la loi El-Khomri dite loi Travail, puis à la réforme des retraites. C'est un ancien du P.C., faut dire.

[teledyn]

The very notion of “productivity” is problematic and calls for further discussion. The word might seem to convey an injunction to produce more and more forever and ever, which makes no sense if the result is to make the planet unlivable. Hence instead of reasoning in terms of GDP, it would be far better to use net domestic product— deducting for depreciation and damage to capital, including natural capital— but currently available national accounts do not allow us to do this.

— Thomas Piketty, Capital and Ideology

[helyiios]

pov ure an european student in polsci