Tuesday, August 05, 2014

Free Market Economist George Riesman Takes Down Marxist Economist Thomas Piketty

Gary North reports:
Thomas Piketty, a French Marxist, got rich this year on book royalties. That his unreadable 700-page book got a huge market will go down as one of the great mysteries of early 21st-century capitalism. We have seen nothing like this since Tiny Tim sang Tiptoe Through the Tulips.

That the world of the Left literati could take this book seriously indicates the degree of desperation of an entire generation of would-be economic reformers. This is not grasping at straws. This is trying to resurrect a corpse. Gorbachev gave up. Deng gave up. East Germany, the only potentially efficient society Communism ever had, gave up.

Now a previously unknown French economist comes along and tries to persuade us that policies that have universally produced economic paralysis and massive corruption are just the thing to deal with the stagnant economy that central bankers and Keynesian politicians have produced. America’s Left literati bought it — hook, line, and sinker; lock, stock, and barrel; bell, book, and candle.

The book has now been taken apart, absurdity by absurdity. The man doing the public vivisection is George Reisman, one of only four Ph.D. students to receive his degree under Ludwig von Mises.
An article well worth your time.