"He proposes a global tax on wealth to help address the problem of inequality today"[0]
"Mr. Piketty is a well-known public intellectual in France. He writes a column in the left-wing daily Libération and served as a top economic adviser to the Socialist presidential candidate Ségolène Royal in the 2007 election"[1]
I exhort you to read up on Piketty and reconsider your position.
The words "tax" and "inequality" each appear once, in completely different paragraphs, in the NYT article cited by the Wikipedia entry on Piketty for the sentence you're quoting, and "global" zero times.
Your second quote is an ad hominem, specifically "guilt by association" — and comes from the WSJ, not exactly known for its own unbiased stance on capitalism.
I quoted Wikipedia as it appears you have not read the book: you must of course read all the citations for the paragraph.
Had you been interested in actually considering the validity
of the sentence I quoted, as opposed to nitpicking, you would have found that the 2nd citation refers you to http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/en/capital21c2 where you can find a table of contents[0]. Chapter 15 - "A Global Tax on Capital" stands out.
Your ad hominem claim is ironic.
You posit that it is "unambiguous that the FT editor [holds an agenda]".
You further posit that the WSJ is biased.
Yet when Piketty "writes a column in the left-wing daily Libération and served as a top economic adviser to the Socialist presidential candidate Ségolène Royal in the 2007 election[1]" you are not convinced that he holds an agenda.
Either you too are guilty of ad hominem, "specifically "guilt by association"", or you are logically incoherent, subscribing to double standards.
Your political prothezlysing - and downvoting - is not conducive to the discussion. Again, I exhort you to read up on Piketty and reconsider your position.
First of all, I'm not proselytizing. I've never once in this discussion stated, or even alluded to my political opinions, let alone tried to convince anyone else of them. I offered opinions about the politics of the editorial staff of both the Financial Times, and the Wall Street Journal, neither of which should be terribly controversial, and both of which are utterly orthogonal to my beliefs; and I offered an opinion about whether Piketty wrote his book in service of a pre-existing agenda, as distinct from a belief. That, too, is irrelevant to my politics.
Second, my claim of ad hominem isn't "ironic" in light of my other statements. Nowhere did I say the positions of the FT or WSJ editors were wrong; I said they were biased. One can be biased and correct, just as one can be biased and wrong.
I don't think it's much of a stretch to posit that the author of your WSJ quote meant it to convey something about how correct Piketty could possibly be, because "socialist". Note, too, that the quote doesn't say Piketty, himself, is a socialist; it just says that he keeps their company (or, more specifically, that they — but mostly, just this one, really, really icky one — keep his): guilt by association.
Contrarily, I'm not saying they're wrong because anything; I'm not saying they're wrong at all. I'm saying, "Capitalists don't like something that points out flaws in capitalism. Film at 11." Inferring anything further is projection and fabrication. Sorry, but I'm not your straw man.
Finally, if there was any downvoting, it wasn't on my part. You can't downvote direct replies.
EDIT: And I have the book already. It's in my queue. I just had to buy another bookshelf, however, so you can probably guess how deep that queue is.
