Mr. Piketty suggests we become what we fight

There’s a certain logical problem with this suggestion:

To implement this type of measure, it would be sufficient for western countries to finally set up an international financial registry (also known as a “global financial registry” or GFR) that would keep track of who owns what in the various countries. As the World Inequality Report 2018 has already shown, such a project is technically possible and requires the public authorities to take control of the private central depositories (Clearstream, Euroclear, Depository Trust Corporation, etc) that currently register securities and their owners.

So government will own the bodies that register ownership. So as to increase the control government has over who owns what. This is not us being unfair about what Mr. Piketty suggests:

In Europe and the United States, everything is done to distinguish useful and deserving western “entrepreneurs” from harmful and parasitic Russian, Chinese, Indian or African “oligarchs”. But the truth is that they have much in common. In particular, the immense prosperity of multimillionaires on all continents since the 1980s and 90s can be explained to a large extent by the same factors, and in particular by the favours and privileges granted to them. The free movement of capital without fiscal and collective compensation is an unsustainable system in the long term. It is by questioning this common doxa that we will be able to effectively sanction autocracies and promote another development model.

That is, in the name of fighting an economic autocracy we should all become economic autocracies. For one of the major powers that Putin holds over the Russian economy is that ownership rights, ultimately, depend upon his favour. The saga of Yukos is evidence enough of that.

Thus, the suggestion is that we should hand such power to our own governments so that they hold such power over us.

It’s also worth considering the role of jurisdictions like Cyprus in all of this. Russian use of that place isn’t, in fact, about taxation - Russian taxes, well, those imposed legally by the state, are low by international standards - it’s about access to at least a modicum of the rule of law. Also, given that the Russian state is not the only taxation body in the Russian economy it’s to provide a certain security against extralegal taxation.

Piketty’s claim is that in order to deal with people fleeing that authoritarian state, with its by and large absence of the rule of law over matters economic, we must hand our own governments the same powers over us as the authoritarian state already exercises over those fleeing it.

As if we should deal with the Nazi confiscation of emigrants’ valuables in the 1930s by taking the power to confiscate the valuables of those who might emigrate from our shores.

Somehow we don’t think that fighting fascism by becoming fascists quite works as a logical construct.