Sobre la desigualdad…

 

Copio las conclusiones del actual Best Seller “Capital en el siglo XXI” de Tomás Piketty

I have presented the current state of our historical knowledge concerning the dynamics of the distribution of wealth and income since the eighteenth century, and I have attempted to draw from this knowledge whatever lessons can be drawn for the century ahead.
     
     
      The sources on which this book draws are more extensive than any previous author has assembled, but they remain imperfect and incomplete. All of my conclusions are by nature tenuous and deserve to be questioned and debated. It is not the purpose of social science research to produce mathematical certainties that can substitute for open, democratic debate in which all shades of opinion are represented.
     
     
      The Central Contradiction of Capitalism: r > g
     
      The overall conclusion of this study is that a market economy based on private property, if left to itself, contains powerful forces of convergence, associated in particular with the diffusion of knowledge and skills; but it also contains powerful forces of divergence, which are potentially threatening to democratic societies and to the values of social justice on which they are based.
     
     
      The principal destabilizing force has to do with the fact that the private rate of return on capital, r, can be significantly higher for long periods of time than the rate of growth of income and output, g.
     
      The inequality r > g implies that wealth accumulated in the past grows more rapidly than output and wages. This inequality expresses a fundamental logical contradiction. The entrepreneur inevitably tends to become a rentier, more and more dominant over those who own nothing but their labor. Once constituted, capital reproduces itself faster than output increases. The past devours the future.
     
     
      The consequences for the long-term dynamics of the wealth distribution are potentially terrifying, especially when one adds that the return on capital varies directly with the size of the initial stake and that the divergence in the wealth distribution is occurring on a global scale.
     
     
      The problem is enormous, and there is no simple solution. Growth can of course be encouraged by investing in education, knowledge, and nonpolluting technologies. But none of these will raise the growth rate to 4 or 5 percent a year. History shows that only countries that are catching up with more advanced economies—such as Europe during the three decades after World War II or China and other emerging countries today—can grow at such rates. For countries at the world technological frontier—and thus ultimately for the planet as a whole—there is ample reason to believe that the growth rate will not exceed 1–1.5 percent in the long run, no matter what economic policies are adopted.1
     
      With an average return on capital of 4–5 percent, it is therefore likely that r > g will again become the norm in the twenty-first century, as it had been throughout history until the eve of World War I. In the twentieth century, it took two world wars to wipe away the past and significantly reduce the return on capital, thereby creating the illusion that the fundamental structural contradiction of capitalism (r > g) had been overcome.
     
     
      To be sure, one could tax capital income heavily enough to reduce the private return on capital to less than the growth rate. But if one did that indiscriminately and heavy-handedly, one would risk killing the motor of accumulation and thus further reducing the growth rate. Entrepreneurs would then no longer have the time to turn into rentiers, since there would be no more entrepreneurs.
     
     
      The right solution is a progressive annual tax on capital. This will make it possible to avoid an endless inegalitarian spiral while preserving competition and incentives for new instances of primitive accumulation. For example, I earlier discussed the possibility of a capital tax schedule with rates of 0.1 or 0.5 percent on fortunes under 1 million euros, 1 percent on fortunes between 1 and 5 million euros, 2 percent between 5 and 10 million euros, and as high as 5 or 10 percent for fortunes of several hundred million or several billion euros. This would contain the unlimited growth of global inequality of wealth, which is currently increasing at a rate that cannot be sustained in the long run and that ought to worry even the most fervent champions of the self-regulated market. Historical experience shows, moreover, that such immense inequalities of wealth have little to do with the entrepreneurial spirit and are of no use in promoting growth. Nor are they of any “common utility,” to borrow the nice expression from the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen with which I began this book.

Pueden traducirlo en la herramienta de google acá ------------------>

En resumen, si trabajas y generas capital mayor al que necesitas para vivir pasas a rentar sobre el, llegando al punto en el cual ya no necesitas trabajar y por lo tanto tus ingresos solo son por la rentabilidad del capital, que dada la estructura de este va creciendo exponencialmente respecto de la rentabilidad del trabajo. Y los países no pueden crecer a tasas que compensen los ingresos por sueldo respecto de los ingresos por el capital en el largo plazo particularmente cuando se encuentra en la frontera tecnológica. (r > g)

Solución de esta máxima humana que dice que los capitales se concentran de manera natural, por que es la forma en que funciona la sociedad y la repartición de talentos y la transmisión de estos??

Impuestos sobre el capital. No para impedir que se acumulen, porque si no se le quitaría el incentivo al emprendimiento. Solo para evitar que los más ricos sean aún más ricos. Tampoco va a mejorar la rentabilidad sobre el trabajo y por tanto la situación del otro extremo del espectro social, porque se está limitado por el crecimiento de la economía.

600 páginas de apología a la igualdad y el mérito de impuestos al capital para concluir que no sirve sino solo como instrumento de marketing para las masas sin ninguna real efectividad en la distribución, peor aún, si es mal aplicada puede desincentivar el emprendimiento.

Cielo santo…

Karl Marx 2.0.

Este es el hit de ventas en economía de la escuela francesa de donde viene Lagarde…y la revolución francesa y Robespierre.

Me parece que no está disponible en español aún, pero es un libro interesante de leer para saber las bases del movimiento mundial actual respecto de los impuestos y todo el discurso de igualdad, justicia y fraternidad…y la posterior caza de brujas…

Como se puede ver, lo de los muchachos de la reforma tributaria chilena no es muy original. Es un movimiento mundial contra la acumulación de capital “desigual”.