Daily Piketty: Matthew Yglesias on Greg Mankiw

Matthew Yglesias: What the right doesn’t get about Piketty: “Greg Mankiw… the latest entry in a…

…genre of… rebuttals that appear to be written by people who aren’t familiar with… Piketty…. Nobody really worries too much about arbitrary inheritance of freckles because freckles aren’t important. But wealth is great! That’s why Piketty thinks it’s sad that so much of the wealth is in the hands of so few people, and it’s why he’s frightened by the prospect of a world in which the best way to get wealth is to be lucky in your parentage. So what’s the solution?… [Piketty:]

When I talk about the progressive wealth tax, I’m not thinking of increasing the total tax burden…. My point is not to increase taxation of wealth. It’s actually to reduce taxation of wealth for most people, but to increase it for those who already have a lot of wealth….

The idea is that it would be a world in which possession of wealth is less skewed, and therefore the typical person is more likely to inherit some…. Piketty’s right-wing critics should engage with the fact that imposing a progressive wealth tax and using the proceeds to finance a giant middle class tax cut is hardly a sweeping rejection of capitalism. The question he’s putting on the table is whether it’s really necessary for a small number of people to live so large for so long and leave so little for the rest of us.

Sports fans: I need help. What are the right-of-center critiques of Piketty besides the excellent one by the very sharp Matt Rognlie that are good enough to be worth recommending, or assigning, or citing?