Thomas Piketty thinks we’re heading toward more equality should the wealth, which he says is produced by the collective, be spread around a bit more. Having more people with more money will mean more education and more education will ipso facto result in more widespread wealth and, presumably, in the more perfect union envisioned by our Founding Fathers.
Lest billionaires, whose number has grown greatly since the days of fickle trickle-down assurances, fret, Piketty, in an interview in The New York Times’s Sunday magazine this week, said that during the post-World War II years of America’s greatest prosperity the top income-tax rate was generally at 81 percent and that 90 percent of the younger generation was going to high school. (And, I should add, it was a period in which a single wage earner in a family sufficed.)
So, put me down as supporting higher taxes on wealth, and in favor of a top-notch education for all — in other words, think of me as hardly radical, but as among the majority of Americans, Democrats and Republicans alike, who in a 2020 Reuters/Ipsos survey said they (77 percent of the Democrats and 53 percent of the Republicans) favored the idea that “the very rich should contribute an extra share of their total wealth each year to support public programs.”
It’s this kind of enlightened thinking we should be reading about in the spring, not the grisly reports coming out of Putin’s barbaric invasion of Ukraine. It’s time for spring cleaning, for the spring cleaning of our minds. It’s time for retrograde thinking to end. Are we to be condemned forever to murderous behavior, to hatred, to ignorance, to greed and self-seeking? Can we evolve? You might well wonder.
This Easter weekend was a good time to think of such things, of autocratic power, of injustice, of suffering . . . and resurrection — a spring story, in short, one of renewal, one of grace abounding. And, boy, are we in need of it.
But can society, ours in particular, be resurrected? Can our sick globe be resurrected? Or will we be at each other’s throats and destructive of what gives us life until life is snuffed out.
It could well be our fate, if we do not act collectively.