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The Pentagon is slated to host an event on Wednesday making "the case for global justice and democratic socialism" as a means to combat China’s rise, sparking ire on Capitol Hill.The event, titled, "Responding to China: The Case for Global Justice and Democratic Socialism," is being hosted by the Institute for National Strategic Studies, a department of the National Defense University, the Pentagon’s top policy shop. The event is open to the public and will be held on the Pentagon’s Strategic Multilayer Assessment platform, a Defense Department initiative that studies global challenges, according to an invitation for the event posted...

News | Dec. 10, 2021 Institute for National Strategic Studies National Defense University Responding to China: The Case For Global Justice and Democratic Socialism By Thomas Piketty INSS Speaker Series February 16, 2022 – Event Details The event will be held February 16, 2022, from 1200-1300, on the Strategic Multilayer Assessment platform and is open to the public. An access link will be posted the week of the event. Summary Western countries are still struggling to define their attitude towards the Beijing regime. In this talk on February 22, 2022, Thomas Piketty will argue that the right answer lies in...

CBS Sunday Morning exploited the coronavirus to whine about income inequality and how terrible capitalism is. It also speculated whether the virus itself was presenting an opportunity to change the economic system. The program, hosted by New York Governor Andrew Cuomo (D) fan Jane Pauley, used 409 seconds of airtime grumbling about America’s “worsening economic inequality.” To start off, CBS News Business Analyst Jill Schlesinger exploited the economic plight of a random American family to argue that “last year, the Census Bureau found income inequality was at its highest level in fifty years.” Three of the four commentators Schlesinger used...

Yes, capitalism is working ... for the Forbes Global Billionaires whose ranks swelled from 322 in 2000 to 1,826 in 2015. Billionaires control the vast majority of the world’s wealth, 67 billionaires already own half the world’s assets; by 2100 we’ll have 11 trillionaires, while American worker income has stagnated for a generation. But for the vast majority of the world, capitalism is a failure. Over a billion live on less than two dollars a day. In his “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” economist Thomas Piketty warns the inequality gap is toxic, dangerous. As global population explodes from 7 billion...

In an interview with Spiegel, celebrated French economist Thomas Piketty speaks about Alexis Tsipras’ election victory in Greece, Europe’s inability to fix its financial woes and what EU leaders can learn from the United States. […] “We may have a common currency for 19 countries, but each of these countries has a different tax system, and fiscal policy was never harmonized in Europe. It can’t work. In creating the eurozone, we have created a monster.” […] “We need a fiscal union and a harmonization of budgets. We need a common debt repayment fund for the eurozone, like the one proposed...

French economist Thomas Piketty, author of the surprise best-selling Capital in the 21st Century turned down France's top award, the Legion D'Honneur. "I do not think it is the government's role to decide who is honourable", said Piketty. Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman called it "the most important economics book of the year - and maybe of the decade". Krugman likely says that because he believes in Piketty's socialist solutions to income inequality. Thomas Piketty's Capital Review Piketty's book is a massive 696-page slog. Fortunately, Harvard Business Review offers this synopsis: Piketty’s “Capital,” in a Lot Less than 696 Pages.The...

Nick Hanauer, internet entrepreneur, has a message for his fellow "zillionaires", the revolution is coming. Mr. Hanauer, an early investor in internet retail giant Amazon..... Now, he writes in Politico magazine, he sees a different kind of future, and the outlook for people like him is not a bright one: "If we don't do something to fix the glaring inequities in this economy, the pitchforks are going to come for us. No society can sustain this kind of rising inequality. In fact, there is no example in human history where wealth accumulated like this and the pitchforks didn't eventually come...

As a boy, my brother used to keep baseball statistics.  Pages and pages of stats, all kinds of things, stuff that today you can get online.  He also kept track of the greyhounds that raced at the local dog track, again with lots of statistics.  He didn’t bet (actually he was a lead-out who was allergic to the dogs, so he didn’t do it long), but just loved working with numbers. It is only natural that my brother got a degree in Economics.  I minored in Economics myself. Thomas Piketty has a Ph.D. in Economics, and studied Mathematics.  I...

We are seeing the most dangerous trend ever. There is an agenda behind the curtain and that is to sustain government at all costs and that includes everything you own. I have warned that either government will move toward a totalitarian state or to real democracy – real Athens style without the career politicians. The latter is possible with civil unrest as we saw in Ukraine. This agenda requires no secret group of sinister corporations, Rockefellers, Rothschilds, or Bildebergs. This is plain old Adam Smith where those in government will never admit they are wrong so the reason they are...

French economist Thomas Piketty has become a darling of the left for allegedly "proving" that, as paraphrased by Chris Giles at the Financial Times, "wealth inequalities are heading back up to levels last seen before the first world war." The Media Research Center's Julia Seymour has described Piketty as a "'rock star' of the far-left," an accurate assessment given praises heaped upon his book and especially his public policy prescriptions by the likes of Alternet and Vox's especially gullible Matthew Yglesias. Seymour also notes that Piketty's work has received a great deal of favorable notice in the establishment press, and...

FRENCH ECONOMIST and darling of the left Thomas Piketty is the latest in an endless array of economists who are clueless regarding profits and what brings about prosperity and a higher standard of living. In his call for ferocious wealth and income taxes on a global scale to combat what he believes is the growing inequality between the rich and everyone else, Piketty has become a media rock star. This merely underscores the fact that pundits and all too many journalists, politicos and economists know less about money and economics than their forebears did 100 years ago. No wonder the...

Since the release of Capital in the 21st Century earlier this year, its French author has consistently made headlines, although the latest media bombshell might be one he and adoring fans wish to forget. Thomas Piketty’s former lover, French Culture and Media Minister Aurelie Filippetti, has gone public about their stormy relationship, which includes a legal claim she made against the academic star for alleged physical abuse in February 2009. Their often stormy relationship came to an end as a result of the complaint, which resulted in the detainment and formal charges filed against the Socialist Party darling on March...

A new French book that decries income inequality has become such the rage among the U.S. left that it is sparking debate on a smoldering political issue: That Hillary Clinton isn't liberal enough to win the Democratic nomination in 2016. Thomas Piketty's “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” uses a mountain of historical data to show that income inequality, a subject President Obama has seized on, will grow without government intervention. One idea is to devote up to three-quarters of income to taxes. Progressives, many of whom are eyeing Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren or even Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders leading up...

A nifty catch by the Libertarian Republic. I used to think AF was a cautionary tale about leftists exploiting the aspiration of equality to amass power over people, but now that I re-read the final line, I see her point: “The creatures outside looked from pig to Koch, and from Koch to pig, and from pig to Koch: but already it was impossible to say which was which.” Credit where it’s due. It takes brass balls to give Orwell himself full Orwellian treatment. Well done, MSNBC. One tiny criticism, though. If you’re going to toast Thomas Piketty and the looming...

There are so many things to mock about General Electric Vox from the fact that there is almost no Vox Populi (i.e. reader's comments) in Vox except for a narcissistic story celebrating itself after just three weeks on the web to Sarah Kliff reporting today with a straight face about how the White House considers that rising health care spending means ObamaCare is working. Perhaps the most hilarious thing about Vox so far is an interview by Vox's Matthew Yglesias of the new hero of the Left who wrote a book decrying capitalism, Thomas Piketty. So what was so funny...

See link for discussion.

Progressive hearts are all aflutter this week, riding high on the continued coverage of Thomas Piketty and his new book “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” which continues to fly off the virtual shelves at Amazon. To say that Piketty’s basic premise is flawed is probably too much of a compliment. Ed already looked at one of the fundamental assertions last week – that median household income had only risen 3.2% over the past three decades – and found it to be off by a factor of ten. But there are other, deeper problems with the Piketty model. One of them...

He has not only been feted recently by White House advisors. He is all the rage at the Council on Foreign Relations, the International Monetary Fund, and the United Nations as well. This 42 year economist from French academe has written a hot new book: Capital in the Twenty-First Century. A recent review describes him as the man “who exposed capitalism’s fatal flaw.”

While an anxious world holds their collective breath over the disturbing events in the Ukraine and elsewhere, these are high times for the political left. With the revelation that the latest Marx re-boot, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, has reached the top of the best sellers list, progressives at long last have found (ironically enough) the commercial justification for their self-righteousness. While French academic Thomas Piketty’s views have leftists waxing poetically on social justice, his work reveals the more sinister instinct of using taxation as a punitive weapon of class warfare rather than a means for combating income equality. While...