Every path along that road goes back to the same thing, including Piketty's: extreme control by a very small group of people over everyone else. Piketty is mer

Every path along that road goes back to the same thing, including Piketty's: extreme control by a very small group of people over everyone else. Piketty is merely suggesting control by a different group. The non-wealthy often respond very positively to that, thinking their sandwich will be bigger and they'll have some enhanced influence - which never actually happens in practice. The types of people that pursue power in very concentrated systems of any sort, almost never like to share their accumulated power. You have to either nationalize wealth and production formally (Socialism), so that bureaucrats or authoritarian citizen boards/panels (or the military as often happens) govern the use & distribution of all wealth and production; or you have to aggressively regulate all possible uses of private wealth, which also requires similar authoritarian control groups for oversight & dictate, that will de facto rule as fascist entities (a veneer of private ownership scenario). This is Socialism vs Fascism, in which one formally nationalizes and doesn't usually bother to pretend about who owns & controls what; and the other de facto nationalizes but leaves you with fake property ownership & control (which they can and will revoke at any time). If you want to pursue any Piketty style premise, all roads go to the same place. There will be no exceptions, there has never been an exception. You can vary the details, it doesn't matter, you get inherently violent, humanity crushing authoritarianism in every scenario if you actually pursue it very far. Piketty requires authoritarian-heavy structures, you can't redistribute and equalize enough in any other manner. We've already figured out the furthest you can go before you tip over: various European nations have experimented out in the open with very hefty welfare state concepts for generations now. They've taken it as far as it can go, before tipping into authoritarianism. Several have had to roll back their burdensome welfare states at times, including eg Sweden, as they rolled into stagnation. It's a challenging balancing act that requires careful management to continue operating well. Piketty has proposed nothing new, these are very old ideas and they've all been trialed in the real world repeatedly, all have failed repeatedly. Piketty is a rehash for modern times, Marx lite. The only response you will ever get when you point out that it has all been tried already, is: well, they didn't crush enough skulls (insert alternative fantasy story here: they didn't invent a technocratic utopia smart AI solution that was good enough to achieve harmony), or it would have worked.