Friday, May 2, 2014

Concentrated wealth isn’t natural or good


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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