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The last chapters of Thomas Piketty's bestseller Capital in the 21st Century are devoted to ideas or policies that might help make the rich a little less rich and the poor a little less poor and the world as a whole a little more fair, in terms of the distribution of income—which is what economics comes down to, and what makes it political rather than scientific. Piketty believes the best solution to the problem of growing inequality in our new century is the installment of a global and progressive tax system. He even this thinks taxes are more effective than erasing all debts for the poor, as this too might benefit the rich. What gets the rich the best and every time are taxes, which is why they hate them so much, and why they spent an enormous of amount of political power and capital on teaching or training (in the sense of training a dog) the middle classes to hate them too. But taxes are only bad for one group in a society—those who did not need, in the immediate sense, social support. The rich only need the government to protect their investments from the risks of the market and their bad choices.

Bill Gates has other ideas. He thinks Piketty is right when comes to inequality, but wrong when it comes to a solution. He does not want to be taxed more, he recently told Piketty. Why? Because Bill is more efficient than Uncle Sam. The idea that a business or an entrepreneur is good with money and a government bad is as old and as common as the hills. Indeed, the majority of Americans thought Romney was better than Obama on issues relating to the economy for no other reason than he was a businessman. Entrepreneurs are slim and fast; government bureaucrats are bloated and slow. The market quickly adapts to fluctuating price signals; the government is stuck in paperwork. And so on, and so on. But, like so much that is pushed by those on the right of American politics, this way of thinking amounts to a lot of rubbish.

For example, the market efficiency theory was, in the first decade of this century, a big part of the political strategy and attempt to transfer Social Security money over to Wall Street. But how could the market be more efficient at handling Social Security than the government when the administrative costs for the latter were and still are very, very low? The government only spends 0.5 percent of its revenue on the management of Social Security, while standard management costs for a big business are usually in the range of 15 to 25 percent of revenue (this data can be found in Dean Baker's short book The Conservative Nanny State). Big businesses have massive marketing expenses and a bizarrely bloated bonus culture. Those two alone would lead to unnecessary expenses—in short, inefficiencies—in the administration of Social Security. But the same is true with other services—such as health insurance, drug research, and student loans. The market makes such services more expensive than they actually should be. The government would, in many cases, do a much better and more efficient job of things than the Bill Gates of this world.