Painting Fakes

So, over the next couple of months we are going to be talking a lot about same sex marriage thanks to the governments decision to hold a 'national survey' on this question in place of the promised plebiscite.  Debate is hotting up already.  The level of vitriol from some conservative Christians has risen appreciably, and it is not only directed at proponents of same sex marriage.  I have seen savage things said to and about quite conservative Christians who have gently suggested that their fellow Christians could consider voting yes , or even just abstaining  without compromising their own view of marriage.  The fear and anger in the air is palpable. I don't want to rehash those arguments.  You can follow the links or find them, and many like them, on the internet if you are masochistic enough to want to read them.  Personally I will be voting yes, but you need not let that influence your decision.  Follow your own conscience wherever it leads...

The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.  We all know that.  The question is, how do they do it? A couple of years ago I reviewed French economist Thomas Piketty's opus,  Capital in the 21st Century .   Piketty shows, using an impressive dataset and some simple equations, that the normal state of capitalist economies is that capital generates larger returns than labour, meaning that over time more and more of the resources in a society go to those who have capital. In Western societies this process was reversed in the immediate post-war decades by a combination of factors.  Rapid economic growth was driven by the recovery from two world wars and the Great Depression.  This led to wages growth and inflation, which redistributed income away from capital and towards labour.  To add to this, governments funded the reconstruction through high rates of inheritance tax, limiting the ability of capital to accumulate across generations. Since the end ...