If Piketty is correct, he has laid the intellectual groundwork for a resurgence of American socialism - and conservatives are starting to feel distinctly uneasy about it. Conservatives have been far too complacent in believing that capitalism is the only possible economic system, and far too aggressive in attempting to demolish the structures that mitigate capitalism's worst side effects. This is news to those on the right who have long championed capitalism's egalitarian benefits. Piketty's analysis of the last two centuries makes the case that capital in its natural state does not tend to spread out or trickle down, but to concentrate in the hands of a few.
But the value of Piketty's work is that it shows that capitalism's postwar heyday - in which incomes at the bottom and the top actually converged - was a historical anomaly. That may sound like an obvious point to you.
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