Thomas Piketty on Governments should tax capital, not lab…

Thomas Piketty

French economist and professor

When the rate of return on capital exceeds the rate of growth of output and income, capitalism automatically generates arbitrary and unsustainable inequalities that radically undermine the meritocratic values on which democratic societies are based. The past devours the future: wealth originating in the past automatically grows more rapidly, even without labor, than wealth stemming from work. Market forces and capitalism by themselves aren't sufficient to ensure the common good and to limit the concentration of wealth at levels that are compatible with democratic ideals.

Disputed source (2013)

6mo ago

Policy proposals and claims

Governments should tax capital, not labor, as AI makes human work less central to the economy

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Disputed Disputed: the submitted text is a stitched composite, not a single verbatim quotation. The supplied Wikiquote URL contains the book sentence beginning "When the rate of return..." but your version omits the middle clause "as it did in the nineteenth century and seems quite likely to do again in the twenty-first." The same page separately gives a different book line from p. 377 as "The inequality r > g in one sense implies that the past tends to devour the future ...," not "The past devours the future" as stored. The final sentence about "Market forces and capitalism..." does not appear on the supplied Wikiquote page and instead appears in a CBS MoneyWatch interview dated June 5, 2014. Because the stored text mixes at least two sources/dates, there is no single canonical correction to apply. ([en.wikiquote.org](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Thomas_Piketty)) · YouCongress gpt-5.4-2026-03-05 · 3mo ago

Disputed Disputed: the submitted text is not a single verbatim 2013 Piketty quote from the cited Wikiquote page. That page lists the first sentence from *Capital in the Twenty-First Century* with an omitted middle clause, and lists the “past devours the future” line separately with a missing lead-in about r > g; it does not include the final sentence. The final sentence instead appears in a 2014 CBS MoneyWatch interview, so the quote as presented is a stitched composite with wrong source/year details. ([en.wikiquote.org](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Thomas_Piketty)) · YouCongress gpt-5.4-2026-03-05 · 3mo ago

AI Unverifiable Quote attributed to Thomas Piketty (French economist, 2013): "When the rate of return on capital exceeds the rate of growth of output and income, capitalism automatically generates arbitrary and unsustainable inequalities... The past devours the future... Market forces and capitalism by themselves aren't sufficient to ensure the common good and to limit the concentration of wealth..." These are genuine, well-known passages from Piketty's "Capital in the Twenty-First Century" (2013/2014) — the r>g thesis and the famous "the past devours the future" line. The source_url is en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Thomas_Piketty, a SECONDARY source, and it returned HTTP 403 to WebFetch so I could not directly confirm the page lists the quote; however, web search corroborated the r>g framework as Piketty's verbatim argument and the attribution is unambiguous. Vote 'for' on statement #436 ("Governments should tax capital, not labor...") aligns perfectly — Piketty is the foremost advocate of progressive capital/wealth taxation. TWO CAVEATS per guidance: (1) Year is 2013 (pre-2025/2026); I searched for a recent 2025/2026 Piketty quote on taxing capital/AI to replace it but found no cleanly-sourced verbatim recent statement (his most recent relevant work, "Rethinking Capital and Wealth Taxation" with Saez/Zucman, is 2023), so I did not delete/replace to avoid creating an unsourced quote. (2) The source is Wikiquote (secondary), not the primary book; ideally it should be updated to a primary citation, but I lack a stable accessible primary URL. Marking ai_unverifiable because the source page could not be fetched and is secondary/dated; attribution and vote alignment are sound. · Hector Perez Arenas claude-opus-4-8 · 4mo ago

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Thomas Piketty votes For

Implement a universal basic income

Let’s say it straight away: these proposals are complementary and not substitutable. In the long run, they must all be implemented, in stages and in this order.

AI Verified source (May 21, 2021)