Imagine if you were given a revenue source like land taxation, impossible to evade, self assessed, getting more important in time with more markets becoming winner take all. And you refused to use it to the fullest. You would either be delusional or corrupt. Most countries are both.

But it’s hard to imagine raising income and wealth taxes will make things much better after such a long experience of the implementation of gender egalitarian ideology. Humpty Dumpty doesn’t get put back together so easily.

Japan is about to cut its corporate income tax (at least 2 points). Argentina is about to throw out the lunatic Kirchner. That place is ripe for some sort of modest move to the right. Even the US may cut its corporate income tax rate. India is gearing up for broad tax reform of a crazy system.

Piketty’s book is pretty much flat-out retarded and is being treated as such by most normal people. I don’t think it will age well.

People dislike inequality at a gut level, and there’s a reason for that. It is easy to dismiss it as the remains of our primitive ancestors, but the fact is that a lot of things depend upon relative status. Among them, mating success; probably the most important thing of them all. Ask any Chinese how hard it is to find a wife today, and how easy it was during Mao’s time. That’s all the explanation you need about the appeal of communism.

Not to defend Piketty, of course, which is a despicable liar. Nobody who works for the Socialist Party of any country should be taken seriously. But Falkenstein is trying too hard. But of course he works in the stock market.

‘Educated kids know what they’re on about.’

I also think that its not the slide into theater that is the problem. That’s dysfunctional, but probably survivable, even sustainable. it’s the slide out of theater, when dupes get into power and either realize that the theater is theater and try to implement it for real (this is the 1960s), or else the dupes accept the theater as reality and act accordingly (maybe the late stages of the Cultural Revolution is an example). It’s the Emperor’s New Clothes, except on the one hand you have angry radicals upset that the Emperor isn’t naked in winter too and demanding the overthrow of the Emperor’s corrupt neo-liberal regime in favor of a radical authentic dictatorship that will force everyone to wear fake clothes out in the cold all winter long, and all summer too. On the other hand you have the earnest leftists who think it would be awesome for firefighters to replace their stodgy old uniforms wtih uniforms cut from the emperor’s lightweight and completely fireproof cloth.