George Rebane
Admittedly not a difficult task. I just finished Brief History of Equality (2022) by Thomas Piketty. Darling of the international Left, we have encountered this French economist before in these pages (here). Our American Left is in thrall with the man’s wisdom, prescience, and prescriptions for a better world. Piketty’s thoughts and nostrums on economics and the future global order are important for Americans to understand since they form the illustrated intellectual basis for much of the Democrats’ social, economic, and even foreign policies. Piketty’s extensive neo-Marxist works give our Left the veneer of legitimacy to sway the country’s center and undecided toward wholesale collectivism.
In my previous remarks on Brief History I concentrated on some of the technical points from his earlier works, specifically points that evinced his massive blindspots about human nature, especially when it comes to our economic behavior in the presence of monetary risk.
In this coda I want to put a ribbon around his arguments promoting the new world order he has invented and labeled “federalized democratic socialism”, along with various other derivative names. This is a destination form of collectivism that Piketty describes as “decentralized” socialism, hence the appended ‘federalized’ attribute. Such decentralization will result when the masses come together to “develop new forms of sovereignism(sic) with a universalist vocation.” If you understand any of this ideo-babble, you’re a better man than I.
The best one can extract from this verbiage is that our global future will be composed of a lot of small sovereign socialist states operating under some TBD central global governance that insures the national public sector wealth of each such federalized state is at least as great as that of its private sector, which will then operate to the benefit of its workers and other ‘stakeholders’ as opposed to its shareholder owners. Actually, Piketty’s formula for corporate ownership has the workers with greater voting rights than the (any remaining) entrepreneurs who conceived, invested, worked, and risked to build the company. (See also Obama’s famous ‘You didn’t build that!’ observation.)
Everyone will be a happy camper in this brave new world because everyone apparently will take their morning altruism pill (Altruvitin?) before venturing out. Without such practiced altruism, the whole socio-economic order would collapse, and revert back to what Piketty calls today’s “outdated hypercapitalism” (which he seems to confuse with corporatism).
Piketty’s federalized democratic socialist world will have achieved the great goal of equality, primarily by having taxed the bejeezus out of our wealthy citizens; all this without affecting their motivation for continuing to create new wealth unabated. You see, Piketty is of the large leftist cohort of economists that firmly holds ‘wealth generation is not affected by tax rates’. As a Lucky Strike Extra, he also teaches that Trump’s policies did nothing to benefit America’s economy, and only served to divert “the middle and lower classes … to have serious doubts about globalization.”
To his benefit, Piketty does admit to different forms of socialism, none measuring up to his new federalized democratic socialism which will be achieved through some yet to be defined grassroots mass revolution by workers who have nothing to lose but their chains. I am reminded of the cartoon with a scientist writing a blizzard of equations filling a blackboard with a large space in the middle in which is written, ‘and then a miracle happens’.
In a cold splash of realism Piketty admits, “it would be absurd to claim that such a path is easy to follow and clearly marked out: nearly everything remains to be invented,” especially since the desired “universalist sovereignism will not always be easy to distinguish from nationalist sovereignism” Huh?
The first line of global elites with dedicated powers will be “transnational assemblies” that result from a “constant search for credible international coalitions capable of accelerating the transition toward socialist, democratic federalism, (that) should remain the ultimate objective.”
But not to worry about the untrammeled road to our workers’ paradise. We may confidently take the first steps by implementing the sure-fire policy of taxing ourselves out of today’s growing inflation. And somewhere along the way, when we’ve set up all these powerful and coordinated transnational assemblies to form the decentralized federalized socialist states, these same established global power brokers will then voluntarily pull stakes, fold their tents, and fade away. Yes indeed.
Don’t you just want to sell a bridge or something similar to people who are so enamored of federalized democratic socialism sailing into the future on an ocean of human equality and altruism?
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