Jeff Faux (http://www.thebellforum.com/authors/jeff-faux)
Not only does capitalist growth not reduce inequality; it increases it.


More... (http://www.thenation.com/article/179413/thomas-piketty-undermines-hallowed-tenets-capitalist-catechism)

The economic history narrative is garbage in this take on Piketty's new work but I see the value and threat in his Work. Piketty takes a quanitative analysis of a contradiction of capitalism right into the 'temple'. It's got to disturb the priests of orthodoxy and that's a plus in itself, what practical effect it might have is unclear to me.



Similarly, the orthodox creed holds that Piketty’s central point cannot possibly be true. The rate of return to capital cannot be higher than the rate of economic growth for long because when the supply of capital increases, its price—the rate of return—has to fall. Piketty’s response: look at the facts, which show that in the real world this adjustment can take so long (a century or more) and cause so much damage that the theory is irrelevant.

The author of this piece, despite his Philistinism, has a moment of perception:


The ultimate solution, he writes, is a worldwide progressive tax on private capital. Piketty understands that this is now utopian. But he argues that the tax is technically feasible and could be gradually adopted region-by-region.

Here Piketty seems out of his political depth. In order to avoid Marx’s apocalyptic conclusion, he skips around a central implication of his own analysis: that the upward redistribution of wealth also generates an upward distribution of political power that perpetuates inequality. An enforceable global tax on capital ownership would require dramatic political shifts to the left within the major economies—at least the United States, Europe, China, Japan—and unprecedented cooperation among these economic rivals to face down transnational capital and force the rest of the world to accept it. Eyes will roll.