"Every society invents an ideological reason to justify its inequalities." Thomas Piketty may be accused of many things, but not of his ability to generate headlines. Because it is one thing to write a book of 1,232 pages (in its French edition); another, almost as meritorious as the previous one, give that rase in an interview with Libération.
The book that Piketty has so masterfully summed up (at least, when it comes to attracting the reader's attention) is titled 'Capital and Ideology', and was put up for sale in France on Thursday (in Spain it will arrive at bookstores at the end of November, with Deusto). If in his previous best-seller, 'Capital in the 21st Century', the French analyzed the increase in inequality, in this one he proposes possible solutions for that problem. The most spectacular of all: ban billionaires. At least, that is what follows from the economist interview published by the weekly L'Obs. Because, according to Piketty himself, "the system that I propose makes it possible to have a wealth of several million euros, or even several tens of millions of euros, for a while. But those who have hundreds or billions must share the power".
In practice, that means an estate tax with a rate that would go from 5% for taxpayers who have a minimum of two million euros in assets to 90% for those exceeding 2,000 million. To give an example, Amancio Ortega would have to pay the Treasury 52,320 million euros.
But Piketty's argument doesn't end there. It also includes the prohibition that no investor can exercise more than 10% of the right to vote in a company regardless of the percentage of capital that it possesses, in addition to, foreseeably, a universal income that would be financed with these assessments to billionaires and that, on top of that, would be double: on the one hand, an amount that every citizen would receive when they turned 25, and, on the other, a transfer equivalent to 60% of the Minimum Interprofessional Salary.
But, according to those who have read the book, Piketty does not touch the consequences of these actions. And we no longer enter the macroeconomic consequences but simply the immediate repercussions.
A basic example: if Ortega has to pay his 53,320 million euros, he must sell his Inditex shares and his properties. That, in turn, will cause the collapse of the price of that company, and the collapse of the value of the real estate market where the Galician of Leon origin has invested. Let's multiply that for all the billionaires in the world and we'll have a crash next to which the Great Depression was a birthday party.
Piketty has told L'Obs that capitalism must be left behind. But his ideas are nothing more than an extreme form of redistribution with little or no chance of being viable, in the first place, and effective, in the second place. Even so, the debate about inequality and redistribution continues. And this book is going to be one of the most talked about in 2020.
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