Delivered. It is a perilous exercise to summarize, in 300 pages, twenty years of research and three economics books of a thousand pages each, crammed with statistics and graphs on the evolution of income, wealth, taxation, and ” make the conclusions accessible to a wide audience. There are bound to be abrupt shortcuts, lost nuances, neglected contradictions. It is even more risky to draw concrete proposals from them in the service of a political project of universal emancipation and justice!
The game is however worth the candle, at a time when a brainwashed left, in France as elsewhere, desperately seeks a unifying program between ecologism, reformism, feminism, post-colonialism, anticapitalism …
Thomas Piketty outlines what he detailed in his bestseller Capitalism in the XXIe century (Threshold, 2013) and in Capital and Ideology (Seuil, 2019), in the form of a historical overview of the evolution of the distribution of wealth and well-being among men. Perceived as the whistleblower of “The explosion of inequalities” occurring over the past forty years, the economist paradoxically reverses this cliché by showing that, over the long period of history, inequalities have only receded. And that it is a question of continuing this movement.
Progressivity of the tax
It is by understanding the mechanisms underlying these inequalities that we fight them. Access to health, education and income have been the main factors of human progress, in particular with the development of the welfare state after 1945. It is therefore necessary to extend it further by bringing to all access to employment, income, education and quality health, and by removing what hinders it: the capture of public contributions, income and assets by those who already have the most. To do this, Thomas Piketty advocates a progressivity of the tax heavily taxing high incomes – as was the case between 1930 and 1970 -, a capital endowment paid to all at the age of 25 equal “At 60% of the average wealth per adult (ie 120,000 euros)” in the case of France, a carbon tax proportional to income, the “de-commodification” of sectors of common interest (education, health, culture, transport, energy) entrusted to “Public, municipal, associative or non-profit structures”.
The author is not blind to the risk of bureaucratic capture of this reduction in the field of private property, which characterized Soviet “real socialism”. So he insists on the fact that the greatest historical progress of redistribution has been made by the democratization of institutions, to counter the seizure of the richest on political power. Here again, we must continue along this path by protecting the elections and the media from the money powers. The goal, he says, is to achieve “A permanent circulation of power and property”, and not to their confiscation, even in the name of the collective interest.
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