The knives come out for Piketty...and they are pretty dull

Kathleen Geier outlines "What Piketty’s Conservative Critics Get Wrong" @ The Baffler:

With his book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty has lobbed a truth bomb that has blown up several decades’ worth of received opinion about the way the economy works in capitalist societies. He makes a powerful, meticulously-argued, data-driven case that inequality is a feature of capitalist economies, not a bug. Let to its own devices, wealth tends to become highly concentrated. The only events likely to prevent our society from plunging into a dystopian spiral of inequity are, on the one hand, certain rarely occurring catastrophes, such as war or depression; or, on the other, dramatic government intervention in the economy, in the form of steep taxes on the wealthy.

You can see why conservatives are going to be enraged by this book.

A conservative backlash to Piketty was inevitable; the only surprise is that it’s taken so long to develop. But in the last week or so, responses from the right have finally begun to roll in. Send in the clowns!