{"id":617902,"date":"2026-06-13T03:25:00","date_gmt":"2026-06-13T03:25:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/buglecall.org\/?p=617902"},"modified":"2026-06-13T03:25:00","modified_gmt":"2026-06-13T03:25:00","slug":"a-villainous-blueprint-for-managed-poverty-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buglecall.org\/?p=617902","title":{"rendered":"A Villainous Blueprint For Managed Poverty"},"content":{"rendered":"

A Villainous Blueprint For Managed Poverty<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Authored by Veronique de Rugy via The Eoch Times,<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Writer and philosopher Ayn Rand was often accused of inventing cartoonish villains. <\/strong><\/p>\n

Rogues like Ellsworth Toohey in \u201cThe Fountainhead\u201d would scheme to seize the global economy\u2019s commanding heights in pursuit of a distorted sense of justice.<\/p>\n

But the people who hold such ideas don\u2019t just appear in cartoons or in Rand\u2019s novels.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Enter Thomas Piketty and company.<\/strong><\/p>\n

In early June, Piketty – the French economist whose work on inequality has made him something of a rock star even while being serially challenged for methodological errors, data imputations and cherry-picked baselines – and his large team unveiled what can only be described as a villainous plan.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a comprehensive program for global managed decline dressed up in the language of climate justice and equality.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The plan is far too ambitious for most nations to accept.<\/p>\n

But given the influence of Piketty and his circle of economists on U.S. wealth taxes and prominent global policy proposals, we should take its underlying ideas seriously.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Piketty\u2019s plan would cap GDP per capita in wealthy countries at roughly $69,000,<\/strong> far less than America\u2019s current $94,430.<\/p>\n

The plan would also limit annual global economic growth to between 0 percent and 0.5 percent. Monsieur Piketty would allot only 0.115 percent annual growth to the U.S, whose GDP has expanded by more than 3 percent on average since 1930. This would hurt not just the billionaires but every American.<\/p>\n

The plan would mandate an international three-day work week and reduce construction activity by 70 percent, manufacturing by 87 percent and even leisure-sector activity by 58 percent.<\/strong><\/p>\n

There would be massive and punishing trade actions against noncompliant countries.<\/p>\n

It envisions a \u201cGlobal Justice Fund\u201d financed not by taxing carbon but by global wealth and income taxes. <\/strong><\/p>\n

This fund would be 20 times the size of current development aid and would be administered by a new international bureaucracy answerable to heaven knows who.<\/p>\n

Don\u2019t be fooled by Piketty\u2019s training as an economist. <\/strong><\/p>\n

This is not economic thinking. Consider the utter inconsistency of relying on a vast stock of wealth (mostly from the U.S.) for redistribution while suffocating long-term growth to near zero. Much of the value of the assets needed to finance this scheme would be destroyed. It is also disqualifying to claim that sub-Saharan Africa will grow at 4 percent if we crush the economies that provide the capital for its investments and buy its exports.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s ask the uncomfortable question: What would it require to enforce Piketty\u2019s plan?<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

About this matter, he is conveniently vague.<\/p>\n

Confiscating something on the order of 10 percent of world GDP and redirecting it through a newly created supranational body does not happen by asking nicely. <\/strong><\/p>\n

You cannot restructure the global economy at that scale without a coercive apparatus that dwarfs anything in human history.<\/p>\n

The mechanism must be authoritarian.<\/strong><\/p>\n

It would require a world government with the power to tell billions of people which jobs they may and may not hold, what they may build, what they may eat and how many hours they are permitted to work.<\/p>\n

And to what end? <\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cClimate change\u201d is an insufficient answer when Piketty\u2019s entire edifice is built on a discredited foundation. The report relies on a baseline from the \u201cRCP8.5\u201d climate scenario that projects Earth warming by as much as 4.8 degrees Celsius by 2100. But last month, the UN\u2019s own climate panel officially retired RCP8.5 (always a high-end estimate) as \u201cimplausible.\u201d A more central projection is around 2.7 degrees Celsius. Replies to Piketty\u2019s X feed pointed this out immediately. His response, as far as anyone can tell, has been silence.<\/p>\n

That leaves the inequality argument. Worldwide income inequality is nearing a 150-year low, but Piketty insists that radical redistribution of wealth is essential for the Global South<\/strong>. And where have billionaires and wealth been popping up fastest in recent decades? Embarrassingly, data from Piketty\u2019s World Inequality Database confirms that it\u2019s in South and Southeast Asia and East Asia. These are the exact Global South regions that have spent recent decades rescuing hundreds of millions of people from poverty through market-directed economic growth.<\/p>\n

A core confusion of the degrowth ideology is its conflation of inequality and poverty, in fact two very different things.<\/strong> Reducing inequality by making everyone poorer is not a victory for the poor. The billions of people still lagging in the global income distribution have one realistic path out: growth. Dynamic, market-driven, property-rights-protected growth is the only proven path to prosperity. It\u2019s also the path to environmental improvement, which costs money.<\/p>\n

Degrowth is the ultimate luxury belief<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s dreamed up by tenured professors in Paris and progressive think-tank pundits in Brussels.<\/p>\n

These are people who already have high incomes, comfortable apartments, generous health care and pensions and whose ideas would pull up the ladder on billions of poor people.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Rand\u2019s villains always insisted they were acting for the greater good. They always had elaborate plans. They always needed just a little more power to make it work. And they thought little about the terrible burdens their plans would impose on ordinary people.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Tyler Durden<\/a><\/span>
\nFri, 06\/12\/2026 – 23:25<\/span><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A Villainous Blueprint For Managed Poverty Authored by Veronique de Rugy via The Eoch Times, Writer and philosopher Ayn Rand was often accused of inventing cartoonish villains. Rogues like Ellsworth Toohey in \u201cThe Fountainhead\u201d would scheme to seize the global economy\u2019s commanding heights in pursuit of a distorted sense of justice. But the people who… Continue reading A Villainous Blueprint For Managed Poverty<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":617894,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rop_custom_images_group":[],"rop_custom_messages_group":[],"rop_publish_now":"initial","rop_publish_now_accounts":[],"rop_publish_now_history":[],"rop_publish_now_status":"pending","footnotes":""},"categories":[18,19,10,21,12,11,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-617902","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cancel-culture","category-censorship","category-civil-liberties","category-election-integrity","category-equal-justice","category-free-speech","category-religious-freedom","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buglecall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/617902","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buglecall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buglecall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buglecall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buglecall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=617902"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buglecall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/617902\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buglecall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/617894"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buglecall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=617902"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buglecall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=617902"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buglecall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=617902"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}