Video: Peter Klein on the Fundamental Flaws of Thomas Piketty’s view of Inequality

Professor and Mises Institute’s Executive Director Peter G. Klein exposes on the fundamental flaws of Thomas Piketty’s view of inequality. From the Mises Blog

I’d like to add more...

The above chart is from Picketty’s book. 

Editors of the New York Sun uses Picketty’s chart to expose on a major source of inequality—the fiat money standard—which unfortunately Mr. Piketty fails to account for.

From the Zero Hedge [bold fonts and underline original]

Well, feature the chart that Professor Piketty publishes showing inequality in America. This appears in the book at figure 9.8; a similar version, shown alongside here, is offered on his Web site. It’s an illuminating chart. It shows the share of national income of the top decile of the population. It started the century at a bit above 40% and edged above 45% in the Roaring Twenties. It plunged during the Great Depression and edged down in World War II, and then steadied out, until we get to the 1970s. Something happened then that caused income inequality to start soaring. The top decile's share of income went from something like 33% in 1971 to above 47% by 2010. 

Hmmm. What could account for that? Could it be the last broadcast of the “Lawrence Welk Show?” Or the blast off of the Apollo 14 mission to the Moon? Or could it have something to do with the mysterious D.B. Cooper, who bailed out of the plane he hijacked, never to be seen again? A timeline of 1971 offers so many possibilities. But, say, what about the possibility that it was in the middle of 1971, in August, that America closed the gold window at which it was supposed to redeem in specie dollars presented by foreign central banks. That was the default that ended the era of the Bretton Woods monetary system.

That’s the default that opened the age of fiat money. Or the era that President Nixon supposedly summed up in with Milton Friedman’s immortal words, “We’re all Keynesians now.” This is an age that has seen a sharp change in unemployment patterns. Before this date, unemployment was, by today’s standards, low. This was a pattern that held in Europe (these columns wrote about it in “George Soros’ Two Cents”) and in America (“Yellen’s Missing Jobs”). From 1947 to 1971, unemployment in America ran at the average rate of 4.7%; since 1971 the average unemployment rate has averaged 6.4%. Could this have been a factor in the soaring income inequality that also emerged in the age of fiat money? 

This is the question the liberals don’t want to discuss, even acknowledge…

The New York Sun’s conclusion

There is an irony here for Monsieur Piketty. It was France who gave us Jacques Rueff, the economist who had the clearest comprehension of the importance of sound money based on gold specie. He was, among other things, an adviser of Charles De Gaulle. It was De Gaulle who in 1965, called a thousand newspapermen together and spoke of the importance of gold as the central element of an international monetary system that would put large and small, rich and poor nations on the same plane. We ran the complete text of Professor Piketty’s book “Capital” through the Sun’s own “Electrically-operated Savvy Sifter” and were unable to find, even once, the name of Rueff.

The same kind of inequality induced by central banking fiat money bubble blowing policies plagues the Philippines.

It’s funny how the statist mindset works.

Step 1. Statists adapt bubble blowing policies. But when a bust surfaces, they blame capitalism for various societal ills such as “inequality” (straw man). This leads to Step two:  calls for more financial repression via inflationism and taxes which leads back to Step 1.

So the statist logic has all been about circularity or doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Some people call this insanity.