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Quotation of the Day…

… is from pages 34-35 of Juan Ramón Rallo’s informative essay – “Where are the ‘Super Rich’ of 1987?” – which is Chapter 3 of the new (2017) English-language translation of the volume of collected essays edited by Jean-Philippe Delsol, Nicolas Lecaussin, and Emmanuel Martin, Anti-Piketty:

imagesContrary to what many people imagine and what Thomas Piketty claims to show, it is not easy to conserve assets in a market economy.  Assets are at the mercy of changing consumer preferences, the emergence of new competitors, and the possible overvaluation (and ultimate collapse) of asset prices.  It is simply wrong to say that there is a threshold at which capital accumulation takes place at an almost automatic pace.

DBx: Powerful evidence against the proposition offered by people such as Thomas Piketty that the value of capital assets grows inexorably is the persistent pleas of owners of capital for state-supplied protection from the forces of competition.  Indeed, I wonder how many are the people who, with one breath, praise Piketty for pointing out the allegedly indisputable and dangerous truth that capital values grow inexorably, and then, with the next breath, join with the likes of Bernie Sanders, Chuck Schumer, and the AFL-CIO to insist that America will ‘deindustrialize’ and become impoverished if Uncle Sam doesn’t protect existing American companies from foreign competition.  (I see a Mark Perry Venn diagram here!)

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