If Chile was the cradle of neoliberalism it will also be its grave

[Infidel144]

[/URL]
In other words "Jews sent me honey and reaffirmed commitment to and hope for a more tolerant and inclusive society. BuT WhAt AbOuT pAlEsTiNe???"
This is not a reasonable way to respond to what he recieved. He's criticizing Israel as a response to something Jews did, not Israel. There was absolutely no reason to mention Israel. If a Chinese-American sends you some present for new years you would say "thanks but what about the Uyghur genocide???"

It does seem to be a habit of anti-semites to work Jews and Israel into any conversation...

[Cyclops]

...
To conclude, two things
1- The European and American far-right admires Israel for preserving Jewish identity while yearning to preserve Hungary,Poland,US, (etc) Christian identity in ways that exclude Jews.

Indeed, and I am sick and tired of the rubbish about Israel being apartheid, as I think they are not, and less institutionally racist than most countries (definitely mine, we have actual apartheid here). The notion that wannabe fascists wank over a perceived ethnostate when its not one sickens me. They really are the stupidest people the Fascists. The greenie brigade seem to have fallen for it too, "Israel Bad" is a reflex for so many kids.

... 2- Criticism of the state of Israelis not antisemitism, and I would like to remind everyone that antisemitism is wrong because it is wrong to denigrate and dehumanise anyone-including the Palestinians....

Completely agree. The West has thrown non-Israeli Palestine into the bin, at the same time as we paw over Israel's business and hold up every bit to misunderstanding scrutiny. Any state has crimes to answer for. Israel's crimes get a fully project enhanced 3 D blow up animation that doesn't always correspond with reality.

Just back to your first point, about Latin American states trying to move away from US favoured rape-and-murder based government, I hope for the best for Chile, but the President of Hope carried on corrosive anti-democratic subversion against Venezuela just as much as the Illegal Iraq Invader and the Orange Idiot. The senile kid sniffer looks like doing the same. I don't want the US to be weaker (we are their loyal allies yay) but it'd be great if they didn't sponsor so many rape-and-murder governments. Good luck to Chile.

[Heathen Hammer]

Talking about it, Socialists have a fiscal responsibility to fight inequality.

Yet whenever a socialist gets a modicum of power over others, he creates more of it. From vicious inhumanity of USSR and Maoist China to woke frankfurt school crap in neoliberal regimes today,

In fact, Social Democracy is back, according to SPD officials. Btw, the SPD is the world's oldest democratic party in the world.Out of curiosity, all 94 SPD parliamentarians voted against the Hitler’s Enabling Act of 1933, a law to replace democracy in favor of Hitler's despotism.

Socialists always tend to fight other socialists, difference between guys like Hitler and Lenin is that at least Hitler hated other people, while Lenin hated his own.

In the next elections, a Starmer-led minority administration could be UK next government. Or not, coalitions are a normal feature of European politics. The Labour itself is an alliance of social democrats/democratic socialists and trade unionists.
The Washington Post recognizes, We are living in a new social democratic moment

And the The Foreign Policy asks, “Can Social Democrats Save the World (Again)? - Foreign Policy

Woke "democratic socialists" are nothing more then pawns of neoliberal corporate elites.
If "democratic socialism" today was anything more then that, they'd be against mass-immigration, gun control, medical apartheid, etc.

Mass immigration? A complete nonsense. No one wants massive waves of immigration.B

Woke "democratic socialists" that you praise want it. So much for defending working class, by driving down the cost of labor.

Gun control, an anti-working class policy...that's funny.Well, it seems that H.H. is a great admirer of Marx."Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary" -Karl Marx

Karl Marx wasn't wrong about guns, Hitler wasn't wrong about smoking being bad for you, Stalin wasn't wrong about killing off leninists and trotskyists, broken clock can be right twice a day, even if it is fiscally illiterat.

[Ludicus]

No, we don’t replace God by the market.Theoretically speaking, tout court,The differences between social democracy and neoliberalism

In great detail, the (ugly) history of neoliberalism (in this country): believe me, its worth to watching, even for students of economy. Obviously, there is neoliberal status quo in the EU.

The invisible hand, english subtitles



Here, after several years of neoliberal measures and four years of right-wing government (2011-2015), anti-austerity discourse gained strength within the electorate.Until today.
------
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15 years ago, Emmanuel Droit wrote in the “Vingtiéme Siecle”,

The memory culture of West Europeans does not match that of East Europeans. In Western Europe, the extermination of Jews constitutes the most abominable crime on the twentieth century’s scale of horrors, with Auschwitz raised to the level of absolute evil. In these countries, the Holocaust represents the benchmark for inhumanity, to which modern conscience refers each time it is afraid of straying. By contrast, the new East European members of the EU promote the painful memory of Soviet occupation, which is incarnated by the Gulag, their own yardstick.
The West regards the Holocaust as Europe’s core memory, whereas East Europeans, who believe that Westerners devalue the role of Communism, criticize this perspective. In return, Westerners denounce East European anti-Semitism because questioning the uniqueness of Nazi terror is thought to downplay the Holocaust

Why do you think a revolution of “some kind” necessary? it's not your purpose a “Western restoration”, against the “cultural authoritarians of the left”?

[Basilius]

This election was a step-back for Chile, which has been one of the most responsible Latin American countries since it overthrew the Pinochet regime. The country allowed COVID-pains and misinformation to whip it into a frenzy, elevating two extremists to electoral prominence.

While there is reason to think that moderating forces will control Boric's excesses, the bigger problem is another country giving in to populist politicians and false cures.

[Heathen Hammer]

"Not giving in to populism" is a codeword for giving in to neoliberal oligarchy, which is much, much worse.

[alhoon]

Please remain on topic, which is about Neoliberalism and Chile, not Eastern Europe or what posters have said in different threads.

[Ludicus]

This election was a step-back for Chile

Can you explain why? what does this mean for Chile?Pinochet’s supporters lost, but the country's far right was and remains alive and well.Boric's coalition includes the Socialists, the centre-left Party for Democracy, the Christian Democrats, and a few other centrist organisations. He promised to deliver universal health insurance, overhaul the pension system, raise the minimum wage, eliminate student debt.He promised finance higher social expenditure by increasing government revenues - especially by taxing big companies and wealthy individuals by 8% of GDP.It's not a "revolutionary" programme.
Boric owes his victory to his moderate, traditional, older constituents, and also to his younger, more "radical" supporters. In my opinion,he is going to operate more like a European social democrat, akin to António Costa (Portugal) or Felipe González (Spain).I hope he is as successful as Antonio Costa was here. And let's keep in mind that Costa's coalition included the Communist Party and the Left Block,it was a pluralist-left coalition.On January 30, we are going to win (again) the next elections-with or without a new leftist coalition.

--

Not giving in to populism" is a codeword for giving in to neoliberal oligarchy,

No, its the opposite.Populism and neoliberalism can cohabit comfortably. Orban, for example, is the nationalist champion of business elites; neoliberalism is mutating not just in Hungary but also in Brazil, Phillipines, and not too long ago, in US under Trump's presidency. But, as alhoon reminds us, the topic is neoliberalism and Chile.

[Basilius]

Can you explain why?

Respectfully Ludicus, I've read enough of your posts to know you're a leftist yourself and are not going to entertain a lot of disagreements against this vein. (Though it is nice seeing a counter-balance to the right-wing nationalists that usually plague Total War forums.)

But for those who are more receptive, from a policy standpoint Boric offers the same package of left-populist economics that promises much, often inefficiently spent, without realistic ways of generating the revenue for them. You ironically quote the European social democrat model (often invoked by leftists in my home country, the US) without recognizing that Boric in no way intends to copy their heavy taxation on the middle class, which social democracy entails. The worry is that Chile goes the way of Argentina, rather than the Nordic countries.

Going into specifics, Chile's inflation sits at 6.7% (more than twice the central bank's target) with the fiscal deficit close to 9%. The government is trying to tame this with a 22% reduction in public spending, but even so the country will not hit its revenue targets and Boric will be hard pressed to implement any of this key reforms. His (well-meaning) environmentalist goals will likely put a wrench in the country's copper exports, which won't help matters. And adjacent to this are his regressive policies, like higher corporate taxes and student loan forgiveness, which will only exacerbate poverty.

There are rays of hope. The coalition government has forced him to moderate his positions (though the communists will impede this), and he's met with economists in a good faith effort to be (or at least be seen to be) more serious about economic reforms. He's certainly better than Kast.

But on top of all this is just the same stupid script we keep seeing time and again: "Neoliberalism" has ruined everything (though Chile is one of the best run countries in LA), we're just trying to be like Finland (they're not), Economics and Finance are right-wing conspiracies (they're really, really not), and social issues like trans-quotas and gender self-determination are paramount (there's a lot more to being an inclusive society than virtue signaling). You see this stuff everywhere in Latin America, and it's just sad seeing it in a country that has resisted it for decades.

[nhytgbvfeco2]

Yeah, there's a reason Chile is, by almost all metrics, the most succesful Latin American country, and that reason is not socialism.

[Heathen Hammer]

Chile's stability is ironically rooted in Pinochet's policies, which were removing two most destabilizing factors in South America, drug cartels and communist insurgents.

[Cyclops]

Yeah, there's a reason Chile is, by almost all metrics, the most succesful Latin American country, and that reason is not socialism.

To be fair our US friends apply a blowtorch to any Latin American country that thinks about implementing socialist policies. That's not a figurative blowtorch, they will literally flood your country with torturers, rape squads and ear-severing mercenaries.

They also do this cute thing where an agency will bomb one cartel in a country, at the same time as another agency works with other cartels to flood the US with drugs, which other agencies then make war on.

[Heathen Hammer]

To be fair our US friends apply a blowtorch to any Latin American country that thinks about implementing socialist policies. That's not a figurative blowtorch, they will literally flood your country with torturers, rape squads and ear-severing mercenaries.

They also do this cute thing where an agency will bomb one cartel in a country, at the same time as another agency works with other cartels to flood the US with drugs, which other agencies then make war on.

I think this is more of the fact that CIA exists as a rogue semi-terrorist organization, that is accountable to neither taxpayer nor existing domestic laws. Certain transparency reforms are necessary to curb CIA's enthusiasm in doing above-mentioned things.
Secondary factor is well, war on drugs.
Maybe, just maybe, banning things like cocaine is silly, because no matter what there will be people that want to snort it? Just let Americans have their booger sugar, allow companies to produce it and sell it to anyone over 18. Big Pharma's opiates play a far worse effect anyways.
We legalized weed in 2018 and our society still stands.

[Ludicus]

He's certainly better than Kast.

We can agree on that.

Economics and Finance are right-wing conspiraciess (they're really, really not) ...but on top of all this is just the same stupid script we keep seeing time and again: "Neoliberalism" has ruined everything

Economics and finances are what they are, not a right wing or left wing conspiracy. I’m sorry but I disagree with you about this.In fact neoliberalism ruins everything. There is a an increasing gap among incomes and tax gifts to Capital. There is no neoliberalism specific to Chile. Financial globalization eroded national borders, while the neoliberal hypercapitalism delivered concentrations of wealth not witnessed since 1914.If inequality is illegitimate, why not reduce it?
alhoon,may I address this topic?

[swabian]

They also do this cute thing where an agency will bomb one cartel in a country, at the same time as another agency works with other cartels to flood the US with drugs, which other agencies then make war on.

I find this to be unfounded incitement. The USA cannot quietly invade and bully countries leaders with a gun to their had. The inclined gentleman was definitely hyperbolic and possibly drunk as he wrote this.

The USA is able to bully other countries, but this happens through their media, and maybe later on with official and unofficial sanctions, which is bad and absolutely bullyish already, but they do not invade with unsanctioned special forces to such a scale, that it has geopolitical consequences. Geopolitical military operations that actually change things are large scale wars (at least like Iraq and Afghanistan). No elite commando can replace that. Stop believing in the US cold war Superman narrative. They only ever do operations that are very local, but decisive. This is definitely nonsense.

[Basilius]

Before even embarking on this discussion we would need to define what neoliberalism even is, and there are two broad definitions:

1.) A left and right-wing boogie-man term for the "Washington Consensus", often meant as a slur, with no one self-identifying as a "neoliberal." Predominate from 1980s-2008, roughly.

2.) As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy puts it:

A politico-economic doctrine that embraces robust liberal capitalism, constitutional democracy, and a modest welfare state.

Which is just describing what all first-world countries are, because this has been found to be the most successful politico-economic model there is. Which is exactly why right and left-wingers constantly attack it, because it's seen as the template for the successful "status-quo."

From there are endless, and I truly mean endless, misinterpretations, grand narratives, and false information what constitutes as "neoliberal", what countries are "neoliberal", and the supposed problems of "neoliberalism." Like most -ism terms it is vague and amorphous, obfuscating clarity rather than providing it.

The best path is to look at individual and specific political and economic policies and examining them on their own merits. But unfortunately, if the desired outcome is twisted to begin with, there's no real point. For example:

Financial globalization eroded national borders

Nationalism is one of the worst ideas of all time, mirroring Liberalism as one of the best, and as we're living in a time where Nationalism is once again ascendant, and people can endlessly babble on video game forums about how wonderful it would be to return to the 1930s, then people deserve what they get.

[Ludicus]

it is nice seeing a counter-balance to the right-wing nationalists that usually plague Total War forums.

Thank you for the kind words.

Boric of left-populist economics...will only exacerbate poverty.

Here, our European path out of austerity worked quite well,since our centre-left government reversed post-crisis budget cuts.We have shown that it is possible to raise incomes, lift private investment, cut unemployment and still have sound public finances.I quote-for example, the Atlantic, before the pandemic, in 2019,

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

In Portugal, a left-wing government came to power four years ago as the country was still dealing with the effects of the European debt crisis and deep spending cuts negotiated with the so-called troika—the European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund. The minority administration in Lisbon formed by Socialist Party Prime Minister António Costa was considered so unlikely to succeed that it got its own hard-to-translate, and derogatory, moniker: geringonça, which in Portuguese means an odd contraption that is very likely to fall apart. Yet the “contraption” persisted and managed to raise the minimum wage, lower unemployment, nearly eliminate the budget deficit, and maintain good relations with Brussels. In sum, it oversaw economic growth while reversing austerity policies.That performance was rewarded at the polls

That's the reason why we are going to win, once again, on January 30

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Portuguese polls, trends and election news for Portugal

--
The Mexican historian and essayist Enrique Krauze says in an interview, “Congratulations President Boric, may your management refute in the 21st century the horror of the 20th century, of which Albert Camus was the most lucid witness…And that’s where I got, because I realized that in his account from twitter Boric has a quote from Albert Camus.Mr. Boric, if you really read Albert Camus, we are facing a new left in Latin America"

For those who are uneware,Camus’s hostility towards Communism is widely known. The quote is, “In politics mistakes follow conviction like a shadow” (Camus).

Chile is a very interesting case; there will be a new constitution with a closing referendum. Chile's Constitutional Convention

78% of those who voted supported a new constitutional text through a 100% elected body. The Convention will have nine months, that can be extended once for an extra three months, with a closing referendum.

Here is what is expected to happen, after the closing referendum.
The objective of fiscal justice should be established in the Chile’s new Constitution

Delegates of Chile’s Constitution Convention met with the french economist Thomas Piketty to discuss about inequality and fiscal policy in the new chart.
“Nowadays, it’s very strange to rewrite a Constitution and do it in this democratic and peaceful way”, Thomas Picketty commented in reference to the Chilean process,
“The new Constitution won’t make the country more equal by itself, but it will allow the future majorities to participate in the reductions of the inequalities. It’s important that the objective of fiscal justice will be clearly established in the Constitution, and the idea of tax progressivity must be referred. If we think in the Constitution’s draft, it’s important not to impose any legal limitation that makes impossible progressive taxation”

I echo the words of Piketty,

What has happened in Chile in recent months – the demonstrations against inequality and the demand for more economic justice – is very important because it shows that in many ways we are at a turning point in the history of globalization. You can see in many countries in addition to Chile, such as Lebanon or France with the Yellow Vests movement, that there is a demand for more economic justice and there is a feeling that the economic system is working in a biased manner for the highest income and highest wealth groups.

In the case of Chile, this is pretty clear. To me, clearly Latin America includes some of the most unequal countries in the world – in addition to Chile, we can also mention Brazil. In Chile, those responsible for the post-Pinochet transition never questioned even the constitutional basis for large inequalities in terms of wealth, the education system, and in particular the prevalence of private education.
There was an ideology of inequality – you know, some famous economists and philosophers like Friedrich Hayek contributed to this legacy. But I think this has to change and I think this political mobilization will contribute to this kind of change taking place.

In what concerns the neoliberal ideology of extreme inequality, in Piketty's words,

All wealth creation is collective in its origin. There would be no rich country or rich individual today without the international division of labor, the over-exploitation of global natural and human resources over the past three centuries and the accumulation of scientific knowledge since the beginning of mankind. Those who claim «this is my money, this is my marginal product» are little kids who don’t know what they are talking about. Private property is a social construction. It is a useful social construction in order to organize societies in a decentralized manner, but only if it comes with legal, fiscal and social institutions which prevent an excessive concentration of wealth and power to develop. It is up to democratic deliberation (and to nobody else) to put the right limits, on the basis of historical experience.

There’s little in common between the kind of colonial capitalism in place around 1910 and the form of social-democratic mixed economy in place around 1980. The system of participatory socialism that I envision, and which maybe will be in place by 2050, is not more different to the latter than the latter differs from the former. This stands in the continuity. How will it happen? I think a system of this sort will triumph because this is the only way to solve the problems we have to solve, beginning with rising inequality and the coming environmental crisis.
The competition with China’s statist and authoritarian socialism (which in many ways stands at the opposite of the participatory and decentralized socialist model that I am promoting) will also contribute to accelerate the transition.

If Western countries maintain their hyper-capitalist, nationalist and arrogant rhetoric, they will simply not be able to compete with China.
The division of elites along education and wealth lines has come together with the division of lower classes along ethno-religious lines, and most importantly with skyrocketing abstention among the disadvantaged.

The market economy is a system that has a lot of merit. I think our modern democratic institutions rely on some notion of reasonable inequality. Of course, some inequality is necessary for growth, to create incentives, but it must not become completely extreme.

It was a view in the 19th century that democracy could flourish better in America (or at least in white America) than Europe, in part because you had a more equal distribution of wealth in America.This is something Tocqueville was very impressed by when he visited America. Until the early 20th century, this was a real difference between the US and Europe.
First, because America had a lot of land available for everyone, so everyone can access land. Second, because you have higher population growth and new inflow of population coming in to the United States, the r-bigger-than-g effect was weaker than in Europe.

So I think it was easier for democratic institutions to work properly. In Europe prior to World War I, you had 90 percent of national wealth in Britain or France belonging to the top 10 percent. You had basically no middle class. The historical evidence we have is that our democratic institutions can be captured by the top groups much more easily when you have such an extreme concentration of wealth. To me this is really the main concern.

I think one of the big lessons of the 20th century is that you don't need 19th century inequality to grow. The kind of extreme inequality of wealth that we had, particularly in Europe, in the 19th century and until World War I was just not useful.
It was not useful in the sense that the inequality was destroyed in the 20th century and that didn't prevent growth from happening. Quite the opposite. It probably helped a little bit post world wars. And even if it didn’t help that much, even if growth would have happened anyway, the point is that it did not hurt.

Extreme inequality was just not useful. If it's not useful for growth, and if it's bad for democracy, we just don't want it.

Everybody will say, "The progressive income tax will never happen. This will never pass." Then this happened, so sometimes things happen. I'm not terribly impressed by the claims that are saying, "Nobody can happen. Nobody will ever take place."

Of course it is true that, in particular in Europe, the wars played a large role in making this happen. Also the Bolshevik Revolution changed the political landscape quite a lot. Many people in the '20s and '30s in Europe accepted tax progressivity because they felt that after all it's better to have taxes than a Bolshevik Revolution.

But if you look in the United States, I'm not sure these things were as important. And still the huge rise in income tax progressivity happened. It happened in spite of the huge inequalities that you had in the US at that time. The democratic system did respond. The Constitution of the US made it, in principle, impossible to have an income tax, and yet it happened.
If you think of the progressive wealth tax today, people say, "This will never happen because property tax is a state matter." But it was the same for the income tax and still it happened.
I'm not saying this will happen in the next five years, but I'm just saying that we should be careful about making predictions of what can or cannot happen, and we should just try to think about the issues and try to see what's desirable and what's not desirable.

I think a system with a progressive tax on net wealth is preferable to a system with a property tax that we have today, and I think the middle class and the lower class would agree.
If you only talk about raising the tax on the rich, I think of course it's more complicated than if you say what you want to do with the money, and who is going to gain from that.
That's a standard strategy of the rich, "I don't want higher tax." They forget to find out the benefits at the bottom and the middle. I think it's a big trick, and it's possible to do away with it.
people have the impression in the United States, that wealthy people are mostly like Bill Gates — founders of enterprises rather than inheritors. when you take the top 50 or top 100 list, you have a lot of inheritors as well. The Walton family, the Koch brothers, etc.

The quick answer is that we don't really know because the wealth rankings of magazines are very much biased in favor of entrepreneurs. First, they are biased in an ideological sense. They have been created in order to celebrate the entrepreneur, although Steve Forbes himself is a grandson of the founder of Forbes.

But in addition, the methodology is biased simply because it's much easier to spot large entrepreneurial wealth than large inherited wealth. Large inherited wealth typically takes the form of a more diversified portfolio, whereas large entrepreneurial wealth, when you have created a Microsoft or Facebook, it's difficult to hide.

When people have a more diversified portfolio, it's harder to spot. When I’ve tried to see how the journalists at Forbes or in other magazines in Europe get their numbers, basically they make phone calls, and they try their best. They don't have any systematic registry from which to draw.

I think they are missing the bigger part of top inherited wealth and top entrepreneurial wealth. To me, one of the main purposes of the wealth tax is that it should produce more information on wealth. I think even a wealth tax with a minimal tax rate would be a way toward more financial transparency. A minimal registration tax on assets, a minimum wealth tax is a way that we can produce more information on wealth, and then we'll see what happens in terms of tax rate.

After all, maybe we'll discover that the Forbes rankings are just completely wrong, and that the top of the wealth distribution is not rising as fast as what we thought and that we don't need such a high tax rate on wealth. I wouldn't mind. Right now, the lack of financial transparency makes it very difficult to have a quiet political conversation and democratic debate about these things.
To me, this is the main worry because people may turn against globalization, or may turn against foreigners, or may decide that Germany is responsible for the problem, or China is responsible for the problem just because we don't manage to have a quiet conversation about a proper tax system. We ought to organize ourselves and do the best out of capitalism and the market economy which, at the end of the day, is a system that has a lot of merit. But we need to find a way that everyone can get to share in this process.

What do I feel has the most promise for the future? There are two main ideas, one is social federalism and the other is participatory socialism.

Social federalism is a view that if you want to keep globalization going and you want to avoid this retreat to nationalism and the frontier of the nation-state that we see in a number of countries, you need to organize globalization in a more social way.
If you want to have international treaties between European countries and Canada and the U.S. and Latin America and Africa, these treaties cannot simply be about free trade and free capital flow. They need to set some target in terms of equitable growth and equitable development. So, how much you want to tax large international corporations [and] high wealth/high income individuals? What kind of target do you want for carbon emissions?
Free trade and free capital flows can be part of this new and more social international treaty that we need to organize globalization, but they can’t be the first chapter of this treaty. They must be put to the service of higher goals, goals about sustainable development and equitable development, and they must be regulated.
Technically, it’s not so complicated. The issue is really not political and ideological. We’ve been accustomed for several decades to treaties without any explicit fiscal or social policy. This has to change.

Participatory socialism is the general objective of more “access” to education. Educational justice is very important in terms of access to higher education.
Today there’s a lot of hyper criticism, not only in the U.S., but also in France and in Europe, that we don’t set quantifiable and verifiable targets in terms of how children from lower income groups gain access to higher education, what kind of funding they have for higher education.
What I call in my book ‘participatory socialism’ – or you can call it ‘social democracy for the 21^st century’ if you prefer – is just a way to build on what has worked in the 20^th century in terms of educational justice, educational inequality, workers’ rights and progressive taxation. I think we can go even further than what we saw in the 20^th century and move toward a system where you still have private property of a reasonable magnitude, but you don’t have an excessive concentration of private property and power among property owners, and you have a permanent circulation of wealth as well as the economic power that comes with it.
We live in societies that are more educated than ever and you need this very broad participation by large groups of people to avoid the hyper-concentration of power that we sometimes see today.

N.B.
For those who have read "Capital and Ideology", Chapter 12, “Communist and post-communist societies”, sub-chapter “China,between communism and plutocracy”,page 725. Piketty is refusing to let his latest book be be censored for China

On a side note: most Americans say there is too much economic inequality, but they don’t care too much about it. Few than half call it a priority, Americans' Views on US Economic Inequality - Pew Research
In fact, I don’t see how a renewed focus on equality would bring voters back to the D.Party, in the near future.That’s the reason why Trump is a testament to the conflict between the intellectual elite and the business elite.
Edit.In the US, the Democratic Party does not find greater support among low-income voters anymore.

[Basilius]

You need to look at economic consensus instead of clinging to a single economist because he supports your views. Piketty is good at data collection regarding economic inequality, but his policy subscriptions, and views more broadly, are heterodox.

But more than this is the left-wing obsession with wealth redistribution. Here is a good policy list of effective ways at making economies more fair:

• Raise income tax to the peak of the Laffer Curve. If possible, migrate to a consumption tax while implementing a NIT/UBI
• Implement inheritance taxes
• Abolish corporate taxes
• Close loopholes more broadly and eliminate regressive policies
• Crack down on barriers to labor mobility, like occupational licensing
• Promote housing in urban centers via less zoning restrictions and less rent control
• Carbon Taxes with Citizen Dividend, and Pigouvian taxes more broadly
• Make immigration easier
• Most importantly, use the above to invest in the following: public infrastructure, access to childcare and preschool programs, schooling through to AA programs, public education, and job training

You know what's not listed there? Absolving student loans, taxing the "super rich" to high heaven, abolishing private pensions, ending "neoliberalism", price controls, allowing people to withdraw from their retirement because the government has no idea what it's doing, and the rest of the zany campaign promises that Boric has made but I can't be bothered to look up.

This is sort of the whole disgusting irony with left wing populism. They're so economically ignorant that they don't even know how to address poverty and inequality, and vote for any charlatan who lays the blame of society on corporations and the wealthy. I don't mean to pick on them so much--right wingers are even dumber and more dangerous--but it's the ostentation of intelligence that's so annoying, especially when people have no idea what they're talking about.

[Ludicus]

. Piketty... economically ignorant... charlatan who lays the blame of society on corporations and the wealthy."...it's the ostentation of intelligence that's so annoying, especially when people have no idea what they're talking about.

Don't go that way...

Implement inheritance taxes

Well, Piketty, Saez and Zucman (20139) have argued that, from a meritocratic perspective, inherited wealth should be taxed at higher rates than earned income. Inheritance taxation is a specific form of wealth taxation.

Abolish corporate taxes

Not at all. Read and try to understand,The G7 legalizes the right to defraud - Le Monde

The monumental work of Piketty exposes the causes and costs of of inequality. Btw, as Piketty himself said, "The good thing about the success of the book (Capital and Ideology) is that many people read it, but the bad thing is that many people are writing or talking about it without even opening it".
I assume this is your case. Bill Gates after reading the book, has said Why inequality matters | Bill Gates

I very much agree with Piketty that:

• High levels of inequality are a problem—messing up economic incentives, tilting democracies in favor of powerful interests, and undercutting the ideal that all people are created equal.
• Capitalism does not self-correct toward greater equality—that is, excess wealth concentration can have a snowball effect if left unchecked.
• Governments can play a constructive role in offsetting the snowballing tendencies if and when they choose to do so.

Extreme inequality should not be ignored—or worse, celebrated as a sign that we have a high-performing economy and healthy society. Yes, some level of inequality is built in to capitalism. As Piketty argues, it is inherent to the system. The question is, what level of inequality is acceptable? ... Piketty’s favorite solution is a progressive annual tax on capital.I agree that taxation should shift away from taxing labor. It doesn’t make any sense that labor in the United States is taxed so heavily relative to capital.But rather than move to a progressive tax on capital, as Piketty would like, I think we’d be best off with a progressive tax on consumption.

Well, a tax on consumption doesn't solve the problem. In fact, Piketty says, read below: "There’s no magic formula that tells you when inequality becomes excessive, but one lesson from the 20th century is that we don’t need 19th century inequality to grow"
And more,

When you have large wealth, you cannot just consume like other people. You start to consume influence, consume politicians, consume academics, you consume power; this is what high wealth is here for.
This country (America) invented progressive taxation of income and progressive taxation of American wealth of the kind that Europe never invented. In the 1920s, and then again in the ’30s, ’40s, ’50s, up until the 1980s, the income tax system, and also, even more so, the taxation of inherited wealth was more progressive in this country than in Europe. The progressive system was invented in America largely because many people in America in 1900, 1910, 1920, were shocked by the possibilities that their country would become as unequal as old Europe.
Around 1900 inequality’s very high, and as we go across over time, inequality begins slowly and then more rapidly to go down during World War I, but particularly during World War II, the Great Depression and so forth. And then it’s very low all the way until around the 1970s, 1980s, and then it starts going up again.One reason for this is that with the slowdown of growth, we are entering a new long period where the rate of return to capital tends to be higher than the growth rate. So we are back to the initial situation that we had prior to World War I that tends to push toward rising concentration of wealth.
It’s quite fascinating to see that actually, not only did the U.S. invent this very progressive taxation, but actually, the country also tried to bring it to other countries and in the post-World War II period, we see that in Germany and in Japan, the U.S. authorities actually imposed very high tax rates on top incomes on the order of 90 percent.

This was not to punish the Germans or the Japanese because it was what the U.S. did at home. It was about bringing together democratic institutions with fiscal institutions to prevent plutocracy — in the sense of excessive concentration of wealth.At that time, this was really part of the American ideal. This seems like ancient history today, but I think it is very important when we study inequality now to realize that we can have this political reaction once again today.

As long as people in the middle class also have access to wealth and as long as disparities in wealth do not get to really enormous levels, everybody agrees that inequality is actually necessary for growth and is a necessary condition to incentivize people. But right now in this country, the bottom 50 percent of the population owns 2 percent of national wealth and the next 40 percent owns 22 percent of national wealth. You don’t need to go all the way to equality to understand that we could do better than that.

There’s no magic formula that tells you when inequality becomes excessive, but one lesson from the 20th century is that we don’t need 19th century inequality to grow. With progressive taxation, growth still happened, and if anything, growth in the post-war period was even higher because it allowed more mobility. It was easier for new groups of the population to accumulate wealth, to create businesses. The other lesson of history is that extreme concentration of wealth can be a danger for the proper working of our democratic institution.

See Making Sen$e post for a more in-depth explanation of the relationship between return on capital and growth.
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Piketty, said on January 4 2015

I had this discussion with Bill Gates at an economics conference in Boston.He told me, "I love everything that’s in your book, but I don’t want to pay more tax."
I understand his point. I think he sincerely believes he’s more efficient than the government, and you know, maybe he is sometimes

.
But the question is:is the world becoming more equal, as Bill Gates claimed? is extreme inequality simply the price we pay for reducing absolute poverty? doesn't make sense.
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You know, in western countries, a very strong distinction is made between, on the one hand, Russian oligarchs, petro-millionaires from the Middle East, and other Chinese, Mexican, Indian, or Indonesian millionaires, regarding whom it is considered that they do not "truly" deserve their fortune, because it would be obtained through relations with state power, or by the misappropriation of natural resources; and, on the other hand( the irony!) the European and American businessmen regarding whom it is good to praise the "infinite contributions" they make to world welfare. (1)
Such a regime of justifications of inequalities which is both hyper meritocratic and Western-centric, illustrates the irreplaceable need that human societies have to give meaning to their inequalities, sometimes beyond what is reasonable.I hope you realize that, but I doubt it.

(1) Russia's oligarchs are different from other billionaires

[Lord Thesaurian]

You need to look at economic consensus instead of clinging to a single economist because he supports your views. Piketty is good at data collection regarding economic inequality, but his policy subscriptions, and views more broadly, are heterodox.

Your libertarian evidence is not welcome here sir.