The issue of inequality of wealth is the last refuge of the left. All of the other issues raised through the years – the immiseration of the working class, the crisis of capitalism, world revolution etc – have come to nothing. There is not a single issue raised by the left that has ever had any historical validity, Inequality is the last baton to beat the drum with and they are beating it as hard as they can.

Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty written in French and now translated into English has weight of pages to compensate for the weightlessness of the argument. The politics of envy are an old story.

Cass Sunstein discusses the book under the quite sensible heading, What’s so wrong with economic inequality? What’s wrong, indeed?

Inequality of wealth is almost irrelevant to the core issue of production and income. Take the example of someone building and then owning an apartment building with 100 apartments put out to rent. If you want to look at it in terms of inequality of wealth, one person owns 100% of the capital and the, let us say 100 renters, have no capital. But the 100 renters also have a place to live, and if there are other apartments available to hold down rents, where’s the problem? As Sunstein writes:

Thomas Piketty’s improbable best-seller, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, has put the question of economic inequality into sharp relief. As just about everyone now knows, Piketty contends that over the next century, inequality is likely to grow. In response, he outlines a series of policies designed to reduce wealth at the very top of society, including a progressive income tax and a global wealth tax.

But Piketty says surprisingly little about why economic inequality, as such, is a problem. He places a lot of reliance on his epigraph, which comes from France’s Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen: “Social distinctions may be founded only upon the general good.” To say the least, that is a highly controversial proposition. With respect to economic disparities, nothing of the kind can be found in the US Constitution, or the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, or even the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.

The entrepreneurial drive is like any human trait, unequally distributed across the population. But like many other social abilities, it is good for us all that some few amongst us have them. That some who have such abilities get rich as a result is no different than the wealth that can come to actors, athletes, writers and others. But in this case, the benefits to the rest of us are so immense, our gratitude should be boundless. Alas, the politics and economics of envy never rests.