From Jeb Bush to French intellectuals, the last few years have seen much talk of income inequality – the “defining challenge of our time,” as president Barack Obama has memorably referred to it. A number of explanations have been brought to the table, ranging from skill-biased technological progress that raises the pay of the highest-skilled workers while eliminating blue-collar jobs, via nepotistic remuneration for large-corporation executives enabled by poor corporate governance, to the expansion of the financial sector.
Perhaps most famously, Thomas Piketty, in his best-selling book “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” argued that ever increasing wealth and income inequality is the inevitable product of fundamental features of the free-enterprise system, and that it can only be stymied by punitive taxation. Such punitive taxation would, according to Piketty and his kin, only have benefits: It would improve our politics, help the poor and not reduce the productive efforts of the rich or the to-be rich in any significant way.
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