Jonah Goldberg’s Excellent Take-Down of Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century

New York Times columnist and economics
Nobelist Paul Krugman showered ecomiums on French economist Thomas
Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century calling it a
“magnificent,
sweeping meditation on inequality” and “an awesome work.” While
noting some flaws, the Washington Post’s financial
reporter Steven Pearlstein nevertheless hailed the book as
“an
intellectual tour de force, a triumph of economic history.”
Timothy Shenk at The Nation gushed, “Stands a fair chance
of becoming the most influential work of economics yet published in
our young century.” And these are just a three of the plethora of
over-the-top accolades that can be gleaned from the reviews cited
on the
book’s Amazon page.

If the response to Piketty’s book proves anything, it confirms
that intellectuals really, really hate the rich.

Now that the initial furor has died down a bit, Jonah Goldberg
has written a thoughtful analysis of the book and its reception
over at Commentary. In his article, “Mr.
Piketty’s Big Book of Marxiness,” Goldberg does a thorough job
of reviewing the various criticisms of how Piketty has
(mis)interpreted history and economic data. Goldberg also shows
that most Americans disagree with President Obama’s assertion last
December that a “a
dangerous and growing inequality … is the defining challenge
of our time.” To the contrary, Goldberg reports…

…in May, when Gallup asked voters what they saw as “the most
important problem facing this country today,” a mere 3 percent
volunteered the gap between rich and poor … A poll in January
conducted by McLaughlin & Associates (for the YG Network) found
that Americans by a margin of 2:1 (64 percent to 33 percent) prefer
expanding economic growth to narrowing the gap between rich and
poor. In 1990, Gallup asked Americans whether the country benefits
from having a class of rich people. Sixty-two percent said yes. In
2012, 63 percent said yes.

It seems that most Americans simply want a fair shake. They
don’t really begrudge the success of others, and to the extent they
do, they don’t want to do much about it. It’s hard to see how any
of this amounts to an inequality-driven powder keg of social unrest
waiting to explode.

So again, who resents the rich? Intellectuals. As Goldberg
nicely explains:

Piketty is a member of the ruling class. Piketty’s way puts
Piketty and his friends in charge of everything. A one-time adviser
to the Socialist politician Ségolène Royal, a star academic and a
columnist for Libération, Piketty is a quintessential member of
what the econo- mist Joseph Schumpeter identified as the “new
class.” Schumpeter’s prediction of capitalism’s demise hinged on
his brilliant insight that capitalism breeds anti-capitalist
intellectuals. Educators, bureaucrats, lawyers, technocrats,
journalists, and artists, often the children of successful
capitalists, always raised in the material affluence of capitalism,
would organize to form a class whose collective interest lay in
seizing economic decisions from the free market. As Deirdre
McCloskey writes: “Schumpeter believed that capitalism was raising
up its own grave diggers—not in the proletariat, as Marx had
expected, but in the sons of daughters of the bourgeoisie itself.
Lenin’s father, after all, was a high- ranking educational
official, and Lenin himself a law- yer. It wasn’t the children of
auto workers who pulled up the paving stones on the Left Bank in
1968.” No, it was actually people like Piketty’s own parents…

Piketty’s argument, with its scientific veneer and authoritative
streams of numbers, is a warrant to empower those who think they
are smarter than the market—and who feel superior to those most
richly rewarded by it.