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… is from page 152 of Deirdre McCloskey’s splendid 2019 book, Why Liberalism Works: How True Liberal Values Produce a Freer, More Equal, Prosperous World for All [2]:
Once upon a time the bosses had all the capital, which was mostly invested land and factories and machines. Now most of the capital is human, owned by the worker. And the physical capital is also partly owned by workers, too, in pension funds and in personal houses. And public capital, such as roads, is not owned in an individual way by anyone, yet it profits. It is another big part of the country’s capital, and [Thomas] Piketty also ignores it. Nor does he account for social capital, such as habit of the law-abiding. His accounting of “capital,” in other words, is radically narrow.
DBx: This reality – one quite the opposite of the frightening quasi-Marxist tale told (and tweeted) about markets by the likes of Piketty, Saez, Zucman, Sanders, and Warren – is unhelpful for persuading people to turn yet more power over to the state. And so the reality highlighted above by Deirdre goes unmentioned by “Progressives.”
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