A reply to Cullen Roche's arguments against a wealth tax 

and his comments on Piketty's C21C

Cullen Roche: "But what I am saying is that rising unrealized asset prices don’t necessarily make other people worse off. For instance, if my neighbor sells his home for $100K more than he bought it for then an appraiser will probably trot in and tell me my house is also $100K more valuable. So my net worth rises through no action of my own and through no negative effect on anyone else. My wealth has become more “unequal” relative to people who don’t own an equivalent house, but I haven’t extracted anything from the economy or caused some great harm to society or caused growth in the future to be lower or anything like that".

--- Sorry Mr. Cullen Roche, what you are implying would in effect be a decoupling/detachment from the real economy, and also from the thermodynamic economy. Trying to argue in favor of exempt will not do it. It would also mean that your capital object is void and exempt of aggregate or general taxation on financial capital objects. And that would not be Bayesian, nor frequentist.
There can never be decoupling in finance from real economy, and never any decoupling in the real economy (regardless of transactions or no transactions) from the thermodynamic economy. All this three things are coupled and attached, even if there is a huuge elasticity/plasticity from the thermodynamic economy through the real economy up to finance economy, and this is also the most scientifically correct abstraction hirearchy.
That if there is no transactions to your specific capital object is totally unrelated and irrelevant to what we are debating here, and Mr. Cullen Roche, you should not let yourself be confused in this way, regardless of right or left leaning political economy. 

Ref. the question of Piketty's definition of "inequality", since he assigns a numerical perspective and definition he does not let his enemies get even a slight chance to group/categorize him with Marx as in "semi-Marxist" or "partly Marxist". Thomas Piketty has no such nonsense, and this is not just very important, it is essentially decidingly important. This is the main part of the reason (maybe the #1 reason) that luminaries like Krugman and Solow are mostly in agreement with piketty.

My interpretation of Piketty's concept and notion of economic inequality, can be described as "economic asymmetry". He combines/aggregates income with wealth which could be dubious/uncertain, but most people who are interested in economics, knows the difference between income and wealth including income or wealth inequality.

Cullen Roche: "The second major issue I had with the book was that it’s very gloomy about the future.  Now, I am a relatively optimistic person so I will try not to view this through rose colored glasses, but man has been making incredible progress for tens of thousands of years.  We have grown by leaps and bounds.  In the post-industrial revolution era global economic growth has averaged about 2.1%.  Since 1913 it has been even higher. Piketty thinks this could drop close to 1% by the end of the century".
--- Mr. Cullen Roche you should accept that the profit rate will fall, globally speaking, in about 150 years it is the final thermodynamic limit. Nor you or any other human will ever innovate yourself away from the laws of the thermodynamics, and that means that economic growth will end in about 150 years. Lest you think that we can decouple/detach the economy from the thermodynamics?

How much do you think the US economy will grow in 100 years? And are you aware of that it can only do so by harvesting/extracting resources or capital objects from other nations?





It is an inverse asymmetrical mistake by Cullen Roche when he criticizes Thomas Piketty and
the "99% vs the 1%" payoff-aspect, and say it's about the 0.1% instead,
because of distribution-comparative-numbers in Norway (or Switzerland) vs the US by aggregate/general distribution percentage statistics. If Cullen Roche had a Norwegian p.o.v., the critique from Cullen Roche would have some weight, albeit I would still disagree. And Thomas Piketty is to the right of the political-economic center of Norway. In the US we would enter the 9%-10%'s as statistical broad representative agents, while in Norway or Switzerland it would be the 2-3%'s, by equivalent finance capital segment. 

Mr. Cullen Roche; you're mostly a good capitalist, I don't think you're 70% good :-} (lolz), but at least 60% good for Americans. But you're not pragmatic enough, not when "push comes to show"... hindsight is so easy, and now it is the easiest part to say that Obama should definitively have tried all he could to MINT THAT COIN! What we know for sure is that he didn't try hard. Simple as that. And he definitively should have.
His New Year’s Eve fiscal cliff deal extended 3/4ths of the temporary Bush tax cuts permanently. When that is the case, it is a 99% surrender before the match even has started. The republicans won by walk over or surrender...! :-[ :-{
Barack Obama would do not only well, but also great to demand from the republicans that the whole debt ceiling be eliminated. And he should anyhow not under any circumstance give more than 1% of the Bush tax cuts to the dark side of American politics. And in this you are very wrong Mr. Roche.