Piketty and the absurdity of limits

The other day, contributor to this page Kewaskumite and I were discussing Thomas Piketty's book Capital in the Twenty-First Century. He had already finished it while I am still in the process of reading it, so the discussion was a bit one sided. However, Piketty explains his purpose and states his prescription fairly early in the book so I was aware of where Mr. K was going with his thoughts. This is actually a lot harder than it sounds because Mr. K's mind works about one hundred times faster than mine. Piketty roots much of his analysis in history, so I have a little edge there, and states that much of the problem in economics today is the gross inequality of wealth and income. His prescription is a global progressive tax on wealth because the core of his argument is that even a minute discrepancy in the rate of return on capital over the overall growth rate of the economy brings an ever-increasing growth in inequality.

But what Mr. K wanted to talk about was the future, where some of these trends we see in the news are heading and what can be done about it. Like Piketty I will give away the conclusion up front. On economic terms at least, Mr. K and I are on the same side but he is a math teacher, not a gloomy historian therefore numbers are what he looks at while I look more at (especially the dark side of) human nature. Mr. K's contention is that inequality has gone about as far as it can go in this country, even with the amount of money being dumped into elections, there is just very little left for the plutocrats to take. Also, the plutocrats will be spending an inordinate amount of money hanging on to their ill-gotten gains through bribing politicians, spending on propaganda, and through physical and cyber security. I contend that we have barely scratched the surface of how far down we can go.

Colorado may have struck gold by legalizing marijuana, but nationally the prison-industrial complex is still steaming ahead a ever-increasing speed. Matt Taibbi may have gone around the far-left bend in claiming that the Obama administration is worse than dubya where white-collar crime prosecution, but it is hard to argue with his premises. Or that the rule of law is now a fiction, as he contends in The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap where laws and punishment apply good and hard to poor Americans, while the rich and corporations can pretty much get away with anything. Power is everything, money is numbers on a computer. We have reached a point where no level of depravity is out of bounds. The top story in my circles this week was corruption in the Supreme Court, five of the Justices threw shame and common decency to the wind and decided that a corporation can flaunt the law and scientific reality if it feels so inclined, opening up new vistas for abuse by the powerful.

How many commoners can the powerful throw in prison? Well, privatized prisons have every incentive to push for ever more punitive laws. As do prison guard unions. as do "law and order" politicians. Will we see debtor's prisons for the unfortunates who fall behind on their student loans? If the outpouring of vitriol against mortgage relief by proto-teabaggers after Obama's election detailed in Pity the Billionaire, a better question is how have we lasted this long without them? The private prison industry has adopted the business plan of arms makers by citing operations in rural congressional districts, bringing jobs and diluted popular representation with them. Like the 3/5s clause in the constitution that counted slaves for political representation in congress, prisoners housed in rural districts increase the political power of right-wingers there without any threat to unseat them. Lots of authoritarian states then increase the antidemocratic tide by never allowing felons to vote again.

With the full-court press against women, teachers, non-christians, and anything that even smacks of liberalism succeeding despite a Democratic administration, to say there is a limit to how much harm the children of darkness can do seems almost naïve. I mean there must be a limit somewhere to how much damage can be done, this is just one instance that makes "the land of the free" Newspeak of the vilest order, but I cannot find where those limits could be.