Taking on the Heiristocracy: History shows that growth alone won’t stop vast economic inequality.
After all, as Piketty points out, America is the country that, after World War I, literally invented “confiscatory” taxes—the type of progressive tax that is designed not so much to yield revenue but to “put an end to” large incomes and estates, because they are regarded as “socially unacceptable and economically unproductive.” Even an ardent apostle for capitalism like Fisher felt that the best solution to the early-twentieth-century inequality problem was a steeply progressive tax on the largest estates—with a rate that could climb as high as 100 percent for an estate that was more than three generations old.