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Ireland, like majority of other small open economies, runs a tax regime that is punitive to highly skilled workers and benign to capital owners. This, as I explain in part here ( http://trueeconomics.blogspot.ie/2014/08/2182014-thomas-piketty-powerful.html ), spells bad news for wealth distribution. It is simply a tax transfer from one form of capital (human capital) to other forms of capital (financial, IP and physical capital). Still, majority of small economies around the world continue to argue in favour of skinning alive their human capital and subsidising (in either relative or absolute terms) other forms of capital, based on a simple argument: in modern world, financial, IP and technological forms of capital are highly mobile (tax them and they will run for the border, goes the argument), even physical capital is mobile over the long run (tax it and investment will flow somewhere else), while labour is tied to its chair by the chains of visas, work permits etc (tax workers and t...

This is an unedited version of my article for the Village magazine, August-September 2014 Thomas Piketty's " Capital in the Twenty First Century " (Harvard University Press, 2014) has ignited both public and professional debates around economic theory of income and wealth distribution not seen since the days of the Interwar period a century ago when applied Marxism collided with the laissez faire economics. To give the credit due to the author and his book, this attention is deserved. Like Marx's opus, Pikkety's volume is sizeable enough to provoke an instantaneous submission of the readers to its perceived academic (meticulously factual and theoretically all-encompassing) virtues. Like "Das Kapital", "Capital in the Twenty First Century" is impenetrable to anyone unequipped with an advanced degree in political economy and understanding of economic theory. Like Marx's tome, Piketty's work is an attempted herald of a New Revolution; the...