Mulally vs. PikettyBy Holman W. Jenkins Jr.The Wall Street Journal • April 23, 2014, p. A13Excerpt:"...In Capital in the Twenty-First Century, the Thomas Piketty book so adulated by liberals, the French economist argues that capitalism is innately flawed by a rich-get-richer, everybody-else-stagnates dynamic that has stayed hidden for the past half century by serendipitous factors..."He argues that capitalism's true nature is to produce stagnation for the masses and ever-concentrating wealth in the hands of the heirs and heiresses. Such is the ineluctable outcome when inherited wealth earns its natural (he says) 5% return in an economy where growth is naturally stuck at 1% except when extraordinary demographic and historical events intervene."...His liberal fans...are so delighted by his afflict-the-rich nostrums they fail to notice his book leaves them nothing to offer the mass of voters except little hope and lots of recrimination. Making capital the enemy will hardly improve their future. And who says a world in which capital rather than labor produces a growing share of income must be a dystopian one?* In fact, shouldn't it be our ideal?"Read more at:http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303825604579517442982061548* Michael Hoffman’s note: "Who says?” asks Mr. Jenkins.God says, in Psalm 15:1 and 5; Ezekiel 18:5 and 8-9; Proverbs 22:7; Nehemiah 5:1-13; Matthew 6:24; Luke 6: 30-35; II Peter: 2. Western civilization says, in Aristotle, Cicero, Cato, St. Basil, King St. Edward, Pope Innocent IV, Dante, St. Anthony of Padua, St. Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, Bishop John Jewel, Samuel Willard, et alia.***
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