The Forbes' Richest 400 List is increasingly not a list of self-made men
And of the few who are self-made, a lot of them are pretty elderly. Therefore, those fortunes are, for the most part, going to be passed on to next generations. Unfortunately, all too few of our billionaires are planning on giving most of their wealth to charity and good-works projects. So the drift towards oligarchy is becoming ever more visible (for those willing to look), both by way of casual observation and by way of looking at the numbers.
Piketty is telling us that the American story is in the midst of an as yet largely unseen, and radical, change that's not going to abate on its own -- which means that unless some political movement, disaster, or unexpected economic development intervenes, we're going to look back nostalgically on the early 21st century as a time when you could still at least pretend that the wealthy actually earned their wealth. By year 2030 or so, that pretense will, however, be exhausted and obsolete; for wealth will then, in the very largest part, be inherited.
Yet at the same time, the powers-that-be can't even manage to allow workers a minimum wage of $10 an hour in most parts of the USA -- which, in terms of its basic-goods&services buying power, is actually less than what was allowed in 1968!
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One of the most depressing things (however enlightening) in Piketty's book, is his talk about France in the Belle Ã"degreespoque (in the years before World War I), which was, ideologically, as much a society committed to equality in principle as we are today. In practice, however, it was totally dominated by very wealthy families -- so much so that it was impossible for ordinary folks and the government to even raise the possibility of seriously taxing great wealth. It was a society in which it was very hard to do anything to improve the conditions of ordinary workers. And this history shows you how that can happen, i.e. how you can have a society (like ours) where the ideology is democratic, and it is claimed that all men are 'equal,' yet in practice there's not a chance in hell of that claim being real!
Americans used to say, "Oh -- we'll never allow ourselves to become like old Europe," yet in fact, that's exactly what has happened and will continue to happen unless it is stopped. Yes, we've always had the Rockefellers, the Carnegies, the Pews and other dynastic families. And we've had dynasties that transferred their wealth from one generation to the next; but such families were not nearly as dominant as their counterparts were in old Europe -- not because we didn't have high returns on capital, but because our economy was growing so fast, and wages were thereby keeping up with that growth. In other words, the relative scarcity of labor (caused by that growth) kept wages comparatively high.
Therefore our nation's dynastic families in America were unable to establish a headlock on our society; they lacked ultimate control; the economy was growing too fast; labor was in great demand and so wages remained relatively high. After that, we had a long period of high taxation on both large estates and capital income. And the anomaly of a great and strong middle class occurred.
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