Who is Piketty and why does he matter? His 700-page book, “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” newly translated into English, is the best-selling book on Amazon. No largely academic book has ever achieved this distinction before.

Piketty’s central thesis is that the world has returned to its pre-World War I norms of extended periods of slow growth that will result in a further stratification of wealth in which the 0.1 percent fare better than everyone else. This is not because of the Occupy theory that the economy is rigged in an evil way to help them. It’s because of Piketty’s theory that during extended periods of slow growth, the mega rich will see their sophisticated investments in capital (stocks and other financial instruments) gain more share of a society’s wealth than everyone else accumulates through their earnings (salaries).

Many economists on the left love this thesis as providing a grand theoretical way to understand how the world has come to be the way it is — a way they don’t like. Paul Krugman leads the way, proclaiming, “This is a book that will change both the way we think about society and the way we do economics.”

It’s gotten respectful reviews from some free-market economists, and some pretty good takedowns, starting with Tyler Cowen’s essay. (Here’s a round-up of links.)

But whether you think it’s hooey or too high-falutin’ or just arcane, if you’re a believer in Proposition 13, Piketty’s emergence gives you fabulous ammo with which to shoot back at the George Skeltons, Peter Schrags and Harold Meyersons — all the lefty pundits who say it is the prime evil force driving California’s downfall. Piketty says states that have property taxes that penalize homowners if their homes increase in value are imposing what amounts to “America’s secret middle-class tax.”

Property taxes (outside of CA) a ‘secret middle-class tax’

This is from a Matt Yglesias piece in Vox:

“Piketty’s big point about the United States is that we actually do engage in substantial wealth taxation in this country. We call it property taxes, and they’re primarily paid to state and local governments. Total receipts amount to about 3 percent of national income. The burden of the tax falls largely on middle-class families, for whom a home is likely to be far and away the most valuable asset that they own. Rich people, of course, own expensive houses (sometimes two or three of them) but also accumulate considerable wealth in the stock market and elsewhere where, unlike homeowners’ equity, it can evade taxation.

“Piketty also observes that the current property tax system is curiously innocent of the significance of debt. A homeowner is taxed on the face-value of his house, whether he owns it outright or owes more to the bank than the house is worth.”

So the next time you face Prop 13 critics, call them “middle-class haters,” and say that’s the view of Paul Krugman’s favorite economist, too. If Piketty’s PR boomlet continues, you can just use his name and skip the Krugman framing.

With or without Piketty, noting that homes are the single biggest repository of reliable wealth for most middle-class families is a strong defense. But if Piketty proves to be the enduring “rock star” of the progressive community that many lefties think, that gives this pro-13 argument way more juice.

Doubt Piketty is the big deal that I say he is? Today’s NYT opinion page has both Krugman and David Brooks weighing in on his book.

“Brian D'Arcy, head of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power's largest employee union, is heading to court to try to fight a subpoena ordering him to explain how two nonprofits he co-manages have spent more than $40 million in ratepayer money since 2000.

“D'Arcy sent a letter to City Controller Ron Galperin and City Atty. Mike Feuer on Friday announcing his intention to ask a judge to stay enforcement of the subpoena, which was issued last week. D'Arcy's lawyer has asked for a court hearing Tuesday morning. …

“The Joint Training Institute and the Joint Safety Institute were created after a tense round of job cuts at the city-owned utility in the late 1990s, and have received up to $4 million per year from ratepayers since. There has not been a public accounting of how the money has been spent.”

What about other union 'institutes'?

That's from the Los Angeles Times. But this sort of scam, in which California taxpayers prop up sham labor programs, is more common than people understand. This is from a 2007 UC press release.

“The University of California, Berkeley's Institute of Industrial Relations and Center for Labor Research and Education along with their counterpart programs based at UCLA will become affiliated with an umbrella virtual organization named for prominent state labor leader Miguel Contreras.

“The UC Board of Regents' Subcommittee on Educational Policy today (Wednesday, Jan. 17) unanimously approved a proposal for the move. It was submitted by ex officio UC Regent and State Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez (D Los Angeles) in honor of Contreras, the former head of the 800,000 strong Los Angeles County Federation of Labor. Contreras died in 2005 at the age of 52.

“During the Regents' meeting at UCSF's Mission Bay complex, union supporters, rank and file workers and others including Contreras' widow and labor activist Maria Elena Durazo, spoke about the significant contributions of Contreras as well as of UC's labor studies. UC President Robert Dynes, an ex officio member of the Regents, also spoke in support of affiliating the UC Berkeley and UCLA labor efforts with the Miguel Contreras Labor Program.

“The full Board of Regents is set to act on the matter during a meeting tomorrow (Thursday, Jan. 18).

“Contreras began union organizing at the age of 17 with the United Farmworkers Union, and became one of the most influential Latino leaders in Los Angeles. He also was a strong proponent of education, particularly for the children of low income workers. Contreras mentored many aspiring political leaders, including Nunez. …”

“In recent years, UC labor research has focused on employment trends, union density, health care policy, and job quality in immigrant and African American communities. Education programs have included leadership development programs for union leaders, and for women and people of color.”

Honoring … this guy?

I'm just so, so confident this is all about academics and not make-work jobs and the creation of phony “research” justifying what unions want.

Now here's the punch line: the circumstances of the sainted Miguel Contreras' death. This is what I wrote in 2007:

“Ten months ago, the LA Weekly broke a huge scoop about a cover-up of the lurid details in the mysterious 2005 death of one of California's most powerful men, labor leader Miguel Contreras. The newspaper documented that the cover story promoted about Contreras' sudden death at age 52 — that he suffered a heart attack while driving — was a lie. Instead, he died while at a small 'alternative medicine' shop that was later raided for prostitution in an area considered 'the most heavily trafficked prostitution corridor' in Los Angeles.”

“This misdescription of the circumstances of the demise of the executive secretary-treasurer of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor was no accident. Instead, the LA Weekly offered evidence of what appeared to be a concerted effort by powerful L.A. officials to hide the truth by blocking an autopsy — which is legally required in 'sudden or unusual deaths.' Then-L.A. Councilman Martin Ludlow hunted for a doctor at Centinela Freeman hospital to sign a death certificate, only succeeding after being rebuffed by two physicians. These were far from the only irregularities.

“After this story broke, something bizarre happened. Instead of the usual media frenzy of trying to get to the bottom of this obvious scandal, initial follow-up stories focused on the furious reaction of one of L.A.'s most prominent liberal pundits, Harold Meyerson, to the LA Weekly report. He blasted the story as a betrayal by a liberal newspaper 'that some of us hoped would help remake Los Angeles into a more humane and equitable city.'

“And guess what? All the media heeded him — not just the LA Weekly.

“A Nexis search of the few weeks after the story broke shows no substantive follow-up of any kind beyond an L.A. Daily News editorial saying Contreras appeared to only be the latest prominent local to benefit from 'celebrity justice.'”

Hypocrisy: The L.A. Times is in the Hall of Fame

Never forget this story any time the L.A. Times starts trotting out the sanctimony about any issue under the sun. And this shameful history isn't the fault of the editorial pages. It's on the Times' allegedly neutral and fearless newsroom.

The idea that Miguel Contreras is treated as an official hero by the UC system couldn't be more telling. That the media have gone along with it also couldn't be more telling.

By John Seiler

I have a lot of problems with the Republican Party. They don’t come nearly close enough to supporting as much liberty as I do. But it’s also worth pointing out ridiculous attacks on them, such as a new one by Harold Meyerson of the American Prospect.

After reading his article, most liberals are expecting the delegates departing Tampa to form gangs to roam the South lynching blacks.

He begins:

“The Republican ticket may hail from Massachusetts and Wisconsin, but Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan head the most Southernized major U.S. political party since Jefferson Davis’ day.”

Wait a minute. Jefferson Davis was the president of the Confederate States of America, so by definition he wasn’t a member of a “major U.S.” — that is, United States — “political party.”

“In its hostility toward minorities, exploitation of racism, antipathy toward government and suspicion of science, today’s Republican Party represents the worst traditions of the South’s dankest backwaters.”

“hostility toward minorities…exploitation of racism”? It seems to me the GOP bent over backwards to feature black and Latino stars such as former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Sen. Marco Rubio.

“antipathy toward government”? Except that the Romney plan for the budget — and the somewhat different Ryan plan — don’t cut overall government spending; they only reduce the growth in spending. And like most liberal Democrats, Meyerson simply ignores not only the $16 trillion debt, but the incredible $222 trillion unfunded liabilities of the federal government.

Even if you expropriated all the money of all the “1 percent” in America, and waterboarded them to reveal where they hid their gold, you couldn’t come within a fraction of paying that down.

Climategate

“suspicion of science.” He later mentions “global warming” — apparently not aware that the politically correct nomenclature now is “climate change.”

Yet one of the biggest climate-change “deniers” was not a Republican, but the late Alexander Cockburn, the far-left Nation columnist, which enraged his and Meyerson’s fellow leftists.

And what about the Climategate scandal? After that, it’s not surprising that people have suspicion, not of “science,” but of tax-funded science bureaucrats on a mission to grab more of our money while producing fake results to push their controlling agendas.

I’m not a “climate scientist,” but to quote Bob Dylan, “You don’t have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”

On “suspicion of science,” he also brings up the “Scopes trial” and “Republicans’ willful resistance to science and, more broadly, simple empiricism.”

Meyerson is under the impression that the Scopes trial was about evolution, probably from seeing the play and movie, “Inherit the Wind.” Actually, it was about eugenics and branding blacks as somehow genetically inferior.

Here’s an actual quote from the evolution book used in the classroom, which Tennessee wanted to ban:

“At the present time there exist upon the earth five races or varieties of man, each very different from the other … the highest type of all, the Caucasians, [is] represented by the civilized white inhabitants of Europe and America.”

Is Meyerson supporting this “science”? I hope not.

The book Scopes used also said,

“future generations of men and women on the earth [can also] be improved by applying to them the laws of selection.”

That is, by eugenics. That’s the reason the sterilization of blacks, as well as supposedly mentally defective whites, was imposed in the United States, and won the backing of the U.S. Supreme Court in 1927. American eugenicists were influential on the even more demonic eugenics of the Third Reich.

California eugenics

And there’s a California angle. This is from the book, “War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race,” by Edwin Black:

“Hitler and his henchmen victimized an entire continent and exterminated millions in his quest for a co-called “Master Race.”

“But the concept of a white, blond-haired, blue-eyed master Nordic race didn’t originate with Hitler. The idea was created in the United States, and cultivated in California, decades before Hitler came to power. California eugenicists played an important, although little known, role in the American eugenics movement’s campaign for ethnic cleansing.

“Eugenics was the racist pseudoscience determined to wipe away all human beings deemed “unfit,” preserving only those who conformed to a Nordic stereotype. Elements of the philosophy were enshrined as national policy by forced sterilization and segregation laws, as well as marriage restrictions, enacted in twenty-seven states. In 1909, California became the third state to adopt such laws. Ultimately, eugenics practitioners coercively sterilized some 60,000 Americans, barred the marriage of thousands, forcibly segregated thousands in “colonies,” and persecuted untold numbers in ways we are just learning. Before World War II, nearly half of coercive sterilizations were done in California, and even after the war, the state accounted for a third of all such surgeries.

“California was considered an epicenter of the American eugenics movement. During the Twentieth Century’s first decades, California’s eugenicists included potent but little known race scientists, such as Army venereal disease specialist Dr. Paul Popenoe, citrus magnate and Polytechnic benefactor Paul Gosney, Sacramento banker Charles M. Goethe, as well as members of the California State Board of Charities and Corrections and the University of California Board of Regents.

“Eugenics would have been so much bizarre parlor talk had it not been for extensive financing by corporate philanthropies, specifically the Carnegie Institution, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Harriman railroad fortune. They were all in league with some of America’s most respected scientists hailing from such prestigious universities as Stamford, Yale, Harvard, and Princeton. These academicians espoused race theory and race science, and then faked and twisted data to serve eugenics’ racist aims….

“The Rockefeller Foundation helped found the German eugenics program and even funded the program that Josef Mengele worked in before he went to Auschwitz….

“Much of the spiritual guidance and political agitation for the American eugenics movement came from California’s quasi-autonomous eugenic societies, such as the Pasadena-based Human Betterment Foundation and the California branch of the American Eugenics Society, which coordinated much of their activity with the Eugenics Research Society in Long Island. These organizations–which functioned as part of a closely-knit network–published racist eugenic newsletters and pseudoscientific journals, such asEugenical News and Eugenics, and propagandized for the Nazis….

“The grand plan was to literally wipe away the reproductive capability of those deemed weak and inferior–the so-called “unfit.” The eugenicists hoped to neutralize the viability of 10 percent of the population at a sweep, until none were left except themselves.”

After Hitler seized power in 1933 and started attacking Jews and others, eugenics lost much of its force in the United States. And after World War II, the Holocaust and the opening of the death camps discredited the movement.

But it’s well to remember that, back in 1925 and the heyday of eugenics, as exemplified by the book used by Scopes, the country bumpkins of Tennessee actually thought that the Bible told them God created everyone equal, and that doing things like sterilizing blacks was evil. By contrast, Clarance Darrow, the “defense” lawyer who defended the teaching of eugenics and black “inferiority” in Tennessee schools, was the “enlightened,” supposedly “pro-science” person Meyerson is backing!

Meyerson again: “today’s Republican Party represents the worst traditions of the South’s dankest backwaters.”

What a way to smear an entire large section of the country. But remember, it was Tennessee in 1925, whatever racism might have existed in the state at the time, not Massachusetts, that in the Scopes trial defended the equal humanity of blacks and whites by banning a racist textbook.

Do a 180?

Meyerson continues:

“No other party in U.S. history has done such a 180.”

Does Meyerson know any real U.S. history?

The Democratic Party was founded by Thomas Jefferson, the guy who said, “Government governs best which governs least.” He’s one of the few men in history who actually cut government. OK, so the Louisiana Purchase wasn’t constitutional. Nobody’s perfect.

But Jefferson’s small-government beliefs were the bedrock of the party for at least a century — and are 180 degrees opposite of today’s behemoth-government, max-tax, total-control-of-our-lives Democratic Party. In Jefferson’s Kentucky Resolution of 1789, he basically said that the states have almost total freedom from the federal government, and implied that they even can secede. Here’s the first plank:

“1. Resolved, That the several States composing, the United States of America, are not united on the principle of unlimited submission to their general government; but that, by a compact under the style and title of a Constitution for the United States, and of amendments thereto, they constituted a general government for special purposes — delegated to that government certain definite powers, reserving, each State to itself, the residuary mass of right to their own self-government; and that whensoever the general government assumes undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no force: that to this compact each State acceded as a State, and is an integral part, its co-States forming, as to itself, the other party: that the government created by this compact was not made the exclusive or final judge of the extent of the powers delegated to itself; since that would have made its discretion, and not the Constitution, the measure of its powers; but that, as in all other cases of compact among powers having no common judge, each party has an equal right to judge for itself, as well of infractions as of the mode and measure of redress.”

Think even a word of that will make it into the Democratic Party platform to be adopted next week?

And get this. Meyerson wrote:

“They also exploit racist resentments in a way not seen since the Willie Horton spot of 1988.”

But in that election, it actually was Democratic Sen. Al Gore who first up brought up the furlough issue (although not specifically Horton) against Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis in the Democratic primaries. V.P. George H.W. Bush only ripped off the accusation for use in the general election. (Horton, who was black, was paroled when Dukakis was governor, and went on to brutally assault and rape a woman.)

Let’s just chalk it up as another example of Meyerson’s historical ignorance.

Enough. It’s Meyerson himself who exemplifies the ultra-intolerance now exhibited by the Left toward anyone to the right of Joe Biden.

Again, I’m well aware that Republicans and conservatives have a lot of intolerance of their own, for example toward the Ron Paul section of their party. And their talk of balancing the budget doesn’t make sense when they want to start more expensive wars.

But if Meyerson and other leftists want to see extremist fanatics, they should just look in the mirror.