The number one best seller on Amazon is a book that has the conservatives really worried,  Capital in the Twenty-first Century by Thomas Piketty.  The hard copy version is sold out at Amazon but I just downloaded it to my Kindle.  Piketty doesn’t think that Karl Marx was right but also doesn’t think he was entirely wrong.   As Paul Krugman points out the popularity of book has conservatives terrified:

“Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” the new book by the French economist Thomas Piketty, is a bona fide phenomenon. Other books on economics have been best sellers, but Mr. Piketty’s contribution is serious, discourse-changing scholarship in a way most best sellers aren’t. And conservatives are terrified. Thus James Pethokoukis of the American Enterprise Institute warns in National Review that Mr. Piketty’s work must be refuted, because otherwise it “will spread among the clerisy and reshape the political economic landscape on which all future policy battles will be waged.”

Well, good luck with that. The really striking thing about the debate so far is that the right seems unable to mount any kind of substantive counterattack to Mr. Piketty’s thesis. Instead, the response has been all about name-calling — in particular, claims that Mr. Piketty is a Marxist, and so is anyone who considers inequality of income and wealth an important issue.

Those of us who have studied history know about the gilded age where inherited wealth and power prevailed.  We can also see a similar phenomenon today as the middle class disappears and the top one percent continue to take more and more of the wealth.  This is never sustainable which is why many of the rich and powerful supported the policies of FDR as they saw support for the Communist Party growing in America.  So what is it about Piketty’s book that has attracted so much attention?  Steven Pearlstein  at The Washington Post explains:

In its magisterial sweep and ambition, Piketty’s latest work, “Capital in the Twenty-first Century,” is clearly modeled after Marx’s “Das Kapital.” But where Marx’s research was spotty, Piketty’s is prodigious. And where Marx foresaw capitalism’s collapse leading to a utopian proletariat paradise, Piketty sees a future of slow growth and Gilded Age disparities in which the wealthy — owners of capital — capture a steadily larger share of global wealth and income.

“The clash of communism and capitalism sterilized rather than stimulated research on capital and inequality by historians, economists, and even philosophers,” writes Piketty.

So we will return to Paul Krugman’s observations:

No, what’s really new about “Capital” is the way it demolishes that most cherished of conservative myths, the insistence that we’re living in a meritocracy in which great wealth is earned and deserved.

For the past couple of decades, the conservative response to attempts to make soaring incomes at the top into a political issue has involved two lines of defense: first, denial that the rich are actually doing as well and the rest as badly as they are, but when denial fails, claims that those soaring incomes at the top are a justified reward for services rendered. Don’t call them the 1 percent, or the wealthy; call them “job creators.”

But how do you make that defense if the rich derive much of their income not from the work they do but from the assets they own? And what if great wealth comes increasingly not from enterprise but from inheritance?

What Mr. Piketty shows is that these are not idle questions. Western societies before World War I were indeed dominated by an oligarchy of inherited wealth — and his book makes a compelling case that we’re well on our way back toward that state.

It’s the widespread popularity of this book that terrifies the conservatives and the one percent.  I have just started reading the book and will try  to have a revue up soon.