“....did not get rich because they invested capital...”
Intellectual Capital IS Capital. Capital isn’t just dollars.
The crux of Adam Smith’s seminal work was that each person has something of value to contribute. That led to the end of slavery, for one thing. And it also creates the opportunity for those in possession of intellectual capital to become wealthy.
As I stated in my first post, I don’t have the knowledge or terminology to debate the point well.
Perhaps what I’m saying is that the relationship between returns on financial capital and on intellectual capital has shifted dramatically in recent decades.
Piketty’s entire point, as I understand it, is based on the idea that return on capital is “unearned” in some sense of the term, as all leftists believe, and that therefore it is entirely right and proper to redistribute this unearned wealth to everybody else.
It is really, really difficult to make a case that return on intellectual capital is unearned, since by definition the wealth sprang full-blown into existence simply because of the application of a creative idea.
It also seems to me that return on “intellectual capital” bears some relationship to wages/salary, since it’s the reward for human effort. I suspect this is some part of the reason leftists seem to be so much less offended by the wealth of Google, Apple, rappers or basketball players than by that of Exxon or Blackwater. The creativity and human effort involved in the first group is easy for them to understand, that involved in making money more traditional business fields they just don’t comprehend.
I wish I could express my ideas on this better, since they seem to align with a major flaw in Piketty’s argument.