Thomas Piketty Is Right Out of Ayn Rand’s Nightmare
Letters, April 17, 2022, Wall St. Journal

“All creations of wealth in history have issued from a
collective process,” writes Thomas Piketty in his book
“A Brief History of Equality” ( Tunku Varadarajan, Books,
April 9). Arguing for aggressive redistribution of the
spoils of capitalism, Mr. Piketty writes that this collective
process includes the division of labor, the use of global
natural resources, and “the accumulation of knowledge since
the beginnings of humanity.”

This recalls Dr. Floyd Ferris in Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged,”
a dystopian novel. “A man’s brain is a social product. A sum of
influences that he’s picked up from those around him,” Ferris
says. “Nobody invents anything, he merely reflects what’s
floating in the social atmosphere. A genius is an intellectual
scavenger and a greedy hoarder of the ideas which rightfully
belong to society, from which he stole them. All thought is
theft. If we do away with private fortunes, we’ll have a fairer
distribution of wealth. If we do away with genius, we’ll have a
fairer distribution of ideas.”

Dr. Ferris and Mr. Piketty are two peas in an equal-outcomes pod.
It seems unfair, however, that Mr. Piketty is paid for ideas
scavenged from fictional and all-too-real socialist dreamers who
destroyed collective wealth faster than it was created.
--Colin Walsh, Charleston, S.C.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/thomas-piketty-ayn-rand-atlas-shrugged-ferris-economist-collectivism-11649969023

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