Piketty Is Wrong: Markets Don’t Concentrate Wealth | Mises Daily

Piketty Is Wrong: Markets Don’t Concentrate Wealth | Mises Daily: "a situation with one big cartel or one owner is equivalent to full socialism and therefore, to a situation where no rational allocation of resources would be possible, as Mises showed in Socialism. It is Rothbard who brilliantly pointed out that calculability is an upward limit to the size of the firm."



"On the unhampered market, those who tend to be the wealthiest tend also to be the most efficient men at allocating capital. If their ownership ability is poor, the consumers sanction them. If their ownership ability is good, the consumer will reward them."



"For Piketty, the rate of return on capital is a mythical stream of income which depends not upon ownership abilities but on how much capital you own. But the distribution of wealth is not as arbitrary as Piketty would like to think. The consumer has the final word in the decision of who must own the factors of production. As Mises in Human Action explained, the wealthy “are not free to spend money which the consumers are not prepared to refund to them in paying more for the product.” On the unhampered market, the rich can accumulate more wealth only if he is efficient to the task of allocating capital, for the benefit of all."



"We should also highlight that 56 percent of Americans are, during at least one moment of their lives, part of the top 10 percent in incomes (a ratio of 5.6), and 12 percent are in the top 1 percent (a ratio of 12). Therefore, we can conclude that the richer you are, the more volatile is your wealth."