OK, you may have heard about the new runaway bestseller:
Capital in the Twenty-First
Century by Prof. Thomas Piketty.
If you know about it, you’ve already made up your mind about reading
it….
While you’re waiting to figure out if you’re going to change your mind,
here’s a must-read synopsis from Open Culture for all the folks (like me) who
are determined to read it but haven’t started yet:
And here’s my observation about the modern, ongoing concentration of
wealth in only a few hands, to the detriment of nearly everyone else in the
world:
The so-called “free market” and the almost universally misunderstood
“capitalist system” do not automatically and ultimately work out for the
betterment of all, or even for the betterment of all those who “work hard to
get ahead.”
Modern corporate law, counter-intuitive tax policy, modern financial structures
and instruments, world-wide and poorly regulated commerce, the complicity of
wealthy folks and politicians, and the indifference of way, way too many folks
are powerful factors that combine in multiple, leveraged ways to place more and
more wealth/power in the hands of fewer and fewer people.
The Horatio Alger character is a chimera.
Look it up. No, it's the other definition....
Oligarchy is real.
Look it up.
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