Paul Krugman: Thomas Piketty’s got conservatives running scared
In his
latest column for the New York Times, award-winning economist and best-selling author Paul Krugman continues to champion the new book on inequality from French economist Thomas Piketty while ridiculing conservatives for having no substantive response to Piketty’s work.
“The really striking thing about the debate so far,” Krugman writes, “is that the right seems unable to mount any kind of substantive counterattack to Mr. Piketty’s thesis. Instead, the response has been all about name-calling — in particular, claims that Mr. Piketty is a Marxist, and so is anyone who considers inequality of income and wealth an important issue.”
Krugman isn’t surprised that conservatives are flummoxed, though, saying that because Piketty’s book so debunks one of their core convictions about the economy, it’s hardly a surprise to find them grasping for answers. “[T]he insistence that we’re living in a meritocracy in which great wealth is earned and deserved,” Krugman writes, is “that most cherished of conservative myths…” But Piketty “demolishes” it.
And
The Wall Street Journal’s review, predictably, goes the whole distance, somehow segueing from Mr. Piketty’s call for progressive taxation as a way to limit the concentration of wealth — a remedy as American as apple pie, once advocated not just by leading economists but by mainstream politicians, up to and
including Teddy Roosevelt —
http://www.salon.com/2014/04/25/paul_krugman_thomas_pikettys_got_conservatives_running_scared/