Noemi Álvarez Quillay?

Untold numbers of children are being smuggled across the southern border into the United States with the active encouragement of the Obama-led Democratic government. 

One of them was only three years old.

The Heritage Foundation’s Morning Bell reports and comments:

There has been a lot of talk from the Obama administration about having more “humane” immigration policies.

But the sad fact is that on President Obama’s watch, one of the most inhumane realities of illegal immigration has skyrocketed.

Children are crossing the border – and they’re doing it without their parents.

The number of minor children crossing or attempting to cross the U.S. southern border unaccompanied by a parent or other adult relative has exploded from 6,560 in 2011 to an estimated 60,000 for fiscal year 2014. Border patrol agents in South Texas reported over 1,000 such children were apprehended by officials earlier this month, including a 3-year-old boy from Honduras.

What explains the dramatic increase?

As a government official from Ecuador told The New York Times, one of the main reasons is a belief held by many in Central America and Mexico that some sort of immigration reform will be passed that allows anyone who can get into the United States illegally to be able to stay.

In other words, the prospect of amnesty is encouraging more illegal immigration – and in this case, the human trafficking of children. Often raised by their grandparents or other relatives because their parents have already come to the U.S. illegally, these children are traveling alone or with human smugglers, called coyotes, who are paid to get them across the border.

And what happens once they’re here? According to the Department of Health and Human Services, by law, the U.S. government must assume custody of “unaccompanied alien children” apprehended by law enforcement who file claims to remain in the United States. The government then contracts with state-licensed facilities to care for the children until it can place them with sponsors.

According to a judge in Texas who has reviewed numerous such cases, the U.S. government is guilty of encouraging this illegal behavior.

He described one case where after taking a child into custody, Homeland Security agents learned that the mother, who herself was in the U.S. illegally, had “instigated this illegal conduct”.  DHS delivered the child to the mother anyway, didn’t prosecute her, and didn’t even initiate deportation proceedings for her.

As the judge said, “instead of enforcing the law of the United States, the Government took direct steps to help the individuals who violated it”, conduct for which any “private citizen would, and should, be prosecuted”. 

The judge said:

By fostering an atmosphere whereby illegal aliens are encouraged to pay human smugglers for further services, the Government is not only allowing them to fund the illegal and evil activities of these cartels, but is also inspiring them to do so.

To get an idea of the danger these children face, one need only read the very sad story of Noemi Álvarez Quillay, a 12-year-old girl from Ecuador. She died in a holding facility in Mexico — authorities there say she committed suicide — after being caught with a smuggler trying to get her across the border near El Paso. Noemi was poor, but had been well taken care of by her grandparents in Ecuador after her parents moved illegally to the U.S.

More information comes from the New York Times:

Noemi was taken to Casa de la Esperanza, a shelter for Mexican minors whose name means “House of Hope”. Over that weekend, she was questioned by a prosecutor. After that, a doctor described Noemi as being “terrified”, according to a report in El Diario of Juarez.

On March 11, when called to eat, Noemi instead went into the bathroom. Another girl could not get in. The doctor, Alicia Soria Espino, and others broke open the door and found Noemi hanging by the cloth shower curtain.

How likely is that? Why would a child suddenly hang herself? And – a twelve-year-old girl hanging herself with a shower curtain – how? – visualize it – try it – we did, and couldn’t, and don’t believe it.*

Notice the insertion of the unnecessary detail, “Another girl could not get in”, as if to imply that there’s a witness that the door was locked from the inside.

The story reeks of cover-up. Was the child murdered? If so, why?

The next day, her parents in the Bronx received a phone call from a woman who told them that Noemi had safely crossed the border. Later that day, they received a second call saying that she had died, according to Ecuadorean consular officials.

Was it even Noemi? Does the child pictured above look like a twelve-year-old?  Doesn’t she look more like an 8 year old? Perhaps it is a picture of Noemi at the age of eight. (Photos were taken of her by her poor grandparents in Ecuador? Unlikely.) Or maybe it is a different child.

The authorities determined that the girl initially thought to be an 8-year-old Mexican was probably the 12-year-old Ecuadorean. In part because her parents, who do not have legal immigration status, decided not to go to Mexico, DNA tests were required to confirm her identity, said Jorge W. Lopez, the Ecuadorean consul general in New York.

The report does not say whether DNA tests were in fact carried out or whether an identity was confirmed.

Autopsies found no sign of a sexual assault, a common crime against migrants.

The man said to have been the smuggler, Mr. Fermas, was arrested but was later freed by a judge, who did not find enough evidence to hold him for prosecution, said Ángel Torres of the federal prosecutor’s office in Ciudad Juárez. …

The police said he had been found in charge of a pickup truck with Noemi inside it. According to Fermas the Smuggler they were lying.

In published interviews, Mr. Fermas has said that the story about the pickup truck was untrue and that the police had entered his house and taken the girl under the guise of rescuing her.

The NYT does not pause to consider why the police lied, why Fermas used these words, why the police might really have taken her away if not to rescue her.

What really happened to Noemi? Who was the dead child? How did she really die? Is it true that “no sign of sexual assault was found”?

Why is the NYT so incurious about the story it is reporting?

It goes on without pause to cold – and chilling – statistics :

In the week after Noemi’s death, 370 foreign child migrants were detained across Mexico, according to the national immigration agency. Nearly half were traveling alone.

The Morning Bell report also looks no further into the disappearance of Noemi and the suspicious death of a little girl. It is more concerned with the political implications of child-smuggling from Latin America:

The Obama administration has implemented multiple policies that encourage illegal immigration.

Its lax and increasingly nonexistent enforcement of our immigration laws has resulted in a 40 percent drop in deportations of illegal immigrants in the U.S. since 2009. Instead, illegal immigrants who have been convicted of further crimes inside the U.S. have been released. Last year, one in three — more than 68,000 criminals – was released.

Interestingly, one of the reasons given for children attempting to cross the border into the U.S. is that they are trying to escape crime and gang violence in their home countries. Yet the Obama administration’s immigration policies are actually releasing criminals back into the very communities where these children are likely to find themselves in America.

This is Obama’s version of “humane” immigration policies.

But what happened to Noemi?

Who was the dead child?

How did she die?

Why?

*  Our shower-rod wouldn’t hold the weight even of a child. A shower-curtain does not lend itself easily to being tied round a neck. Also, it would have to be hung very high for the average twelve-year-old to suspend herself.  She would have to stand on the edge of the tub (if there is one under the shower) and then take her feet off it.  The shower curtain and its rod would have to be so strong that her weight would not then drop her to the bottom of the tub or onto the floor of the bathroom.

We think an eight year old girl was murdered. And so probably was Noemi, in some clumsy cover-up plot with a substitution of identities. The plot has probably succeeded. The unlikely story that Noemi committed suicide will probably never be further investigated. The truth will probably never be known.

Robert Spencer writes at Jihad Watch:

It has already been a busy Memorial Day weekend. Stories reported at Jihad Watch over the last two days:

Saturday

Tunisia: Muslim screaming “The nation of Muhammad returns for vengeance” stabs Jew, is released

Sharia Egypt: Christian gets four years prison, $1400 fine for insulting Islam by drawing cartoon of Muhammad on Facebook

Somalia: Islamic jihadists murder at least 10 in jihad attack on parliament

Yemen: Islamic jihadists murder at least 27 people in raid on city

Pakistan: Islamic jihadists murder seven in three separate blasts

Thailand: Islamic jihadists murder three, injure 55 with series of blasts

Nigeria: Islamic jihadist murders two in bungled jihad/martyrdom suicide bombing

Iraq: Islamic jihadists murder seven people with car bomb at alcohol shop

Uganda: Churches step up security after threats from Islamic jihad group

Sunday

Australia: Jihad fundraiser and brother of convicted terrorist preaching in mosques

Iran’s Supreme Leader: Jihad will continue until America is no more

Syria: Sharia enforcers disrupt wedding party, detain women for un-Islamic dress

Authorities suspect Islamic jihadists behind murder of four at Brussels Jewish Museum

Djibouti: Islamic jihadists murder three with bomb in restaurant filled with Western soldiers

Today

Nigeria: Islamic jihadists of Boko Haram murder 24 people in attack on crowded market

In the face of all this, the Pope calls a man who has just partnered with a jihad terror group vowed to the destruction of the Jewish State a “man of peace” … The President of the United States has said, “The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam”, even to the point of removing all mention of Islam and jihad from counter-terror training material, acceding to the demand of Muslim groups with links to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood — and thereby forbidding law enforcement agents from studying and understanding the motives and goals of those who have vowed to destroy us.

And so on Memorial Day, we remember when we had leaders to defend us. We still have strong individuals who have vowed the defense of our nation, and for that we can be grateful, but they are being led by a political class so willfully ignorant of prevailing realities, and so deeply compromised, that they make misstep after misstep, endangering us all — while a likewise compromised media does everything it can to cover for them and defame those who sound the alarm about this problem. …

We remember that in our nation’s darkest days, there arose strong, rough men — the ones to whom Churchill referred when he noted that “we sleep safely at night because rough men stand ready to visit violence on those who would harm us”. For that we pause today to offer our gratitude [to them], and our hope that there still remains enough of them to see us through this present darkness.

Our resolve to remain free is iron; now all we need are some leaders with similar resolve.

We like that idea immensely. But we know there are many among us whose resolve to subjugate us to the will of over-mighty government, and even to the domination of savage Islam, is also iron.

Their idea of a desirable leader is Hillary Clinton. Judging by appearances and her record, the Benghazi disaster in particular, we would not describe her as a strong rough man ready to visit violence on those who would harm us. We dare to hope for someone stronger, rougher, masculine, and militant.

Steven Hayward of PowerLine interviews Robert Bryce on Energy. The quantity consumed in America every day is staggering – don’t miss Bryce’s description of it – and can only be met by the use of fossil fuels. He also talks about the lies that the Sierra Club and Greenpeace tell, and pours justified scorn on wind power. He uses solar panels on his own roof, but states firmly that solar power can only provide an “infinitesimal” proportion of the energy America needs. He declares himself an optimist, excited by the fact that technologically “we are doing more with less”.

Some cultures are superior to others. To be specific, Western culture is superior to others.

But, as everyone knows, it is not politically correct to say this.

The reliably funny Fred Reed writes (in part):

I am done for, and damned. Yes, a poor sinner who has strayed from the path of righteousness, and now sits brooding over a bottle of Padre Kino, Mexican rust-remover marauding as red wine, for I have done the unpardonable: I have said – I cringe with shame – that some cultures are superior to others.

It gnaws my soul.

Please don’t misjudge me. I am in most respects a good American. I have nothing against brainless, passive-aggressive, narcissistic sanctimony, nor preening academic mediocrity, nor intellectual vacuity. No. I tell you, I love all of these things. I am devoted to our traditions. I believe to the roots of my teeth that bovine complacency is the bedrock of democracy. Indeed, the only criticism I can make of our national intellectual life is that it would embarrass a microcephalic box-turtle.

Oh god. Wait. I didn’t mean to imply that microcephalic box-turtles are in any way inferior. They are just otherly abled. I apologize, and acknowledge my Vertebrate Privilege.

Let me recount my fall from grace as a warning to those that will hear. Long ago, a callow youth, I was reading the Huffington Post (this column has no respect for chronology), which informed me that no culture is superior to any other: They are just different. To think otherwise, it huffed, was to concede oneself to be among the Fallen, and perhaps a Republican.

I read this and the scales fell from my eyes (though I had no interest in going to Damascus, where they were using nerve gas). I thought, Yes! It’s true! Hosanna! All cultures are equal! Jewish culture is not superior to Nazi, just different. Why hadn’t I seen it before? The culture of Switzerland is not better than that of North Korea, and the South of Bull Conner was in no way inferior to the most dappled, liquid-eyed liberalism of Massachusetts!

For years I believed this, enraptured, and prattled like a jaybird. I was among the Saved. Then … Woe! Woe! … Padre Kino got the best of me. Oh, Demon Rum! Drink has ever been my downfall …

I was in my cups and, prompted by the Devil, thought: All cultures equal? Exactly how is a pack of nekkid savages in the rain forests of Papua-New Guinea, who eat weird pasty white grubs and each other, who speak a language consisting of seven words none of which means anything … how could they possibly be the equals of Europeans who brush their teeth and wrote Hamlet’s soliloquy? Equal how? In the eyes of God, maybe. If so, I figured the Old Boy must need glasses.

So low had I sunk.

Floating in the vile effluvium of the corrupting grape, I engendered worse thoughts. Regarding Islam, for example. How equal was this medieval horror? Here is a faith that will not let its girl children learn to read, and indeed holds them down screaming and mutilates their genitals with a razor blade and no anesthetic. Equal? To what? …

You see. Wine. Booze. The Great Purple Father was making me lose all devotion to equality. Shun strong liquor, I implore you, lest you start to favor the death penalty for such victims of intolerance as Ted Bundy, who was misunderstood by society.

But back to Islam. Before, alight with the equality of all cultures, I had thought clitoridectomy to be a minor surgery, not much different from sending girls to Wellesley. Actually, Wellesley had seemed worse, as on campus girls underwent forced exposure to oppressive dead white men like Plato, while Moslem girls faced nothing worse than gangrene.  But suddenly I wasn’t sure. My Huffington-flavored faith wavered.

I even reflected at one point that European culture had invented everything that kept many of the rest from living in the animal shelter. Where they would probably eat the animals. …

Why was it, I wondered, that all cultures were equal, but that all cultures were superior to white European culture? This seemed illogical. In my earlier state of virtue, I had understood such considerations to be the result of Male Linear Thinking, which had earlier been called “thinking” until it was noticed who was best at it. …

Having decided that some cultures were superior to others, I fell deeper into error, and wondered whether maybe being smart was better than being stupid. Before, I had understood from the Washington Post that being illiterate and borderline retarded was a sign of Authenticity. Well, I certainly wanted to be Authentic, though I thought I would pass on eating the pasty white grubs. (Authentic what was never mentioned, but it didn’t seem to matter. If Salon was for it, it must be good.)

I began dressing like the contents of a dumpster, with butt-hanger pants and a baseball cap on sideways so as to look like an idiot. I petitioned the Educational Testing Service to have my SATs lowered, and began Vocabulary Limitation Therapy. I considered lobotomy. Such was my desire for Authenticity.

It did not work. No. No amount of abasement, no embrace of degradation can overcome Vertebrate Privilege. But, like a sociologist, I could revel in being an earnest aspirant to degeneracy. Small compensation, but better than nothing.

But alas! Alack! I am ruined. Having lost one’s faith in the transparently absurd, one may never go back. I will never again believe the Iroquois the equals of the Finns. I am lost.

 

(Hat-tip Frank)

Thomas Piketty’s book Capital in the Twenty-First Century (see our review of it, The Savior of Socialism Proves the Worth of Capitalism, under Pages) has been found to contain serious errors by the Financial Times.

Their findings confirm the unfavorable verdict pronounced on the book by both our reviewer Don L and, in comment, by our in-house economist Burro.

We quote from the FT article by Chris Giles:

The data underpinning Professor Piketty’s 577-page tome, which has dominated best-seller lists in recent weeks, contain a series of errors that skew his findings. The FT found mistakes and unexplained entries in his spreadsheets …

The central theme of Prof Piketty’s work is that wealth inequalities are heading back up to levels last seen before the first world war. The investigation undercuts this claim, indicating there is little evidence in Prof Piketty’s original sources to bear out the thesis that an increasing share of total wealth is held by the richest few.

Prof Piketty … provides detailed sourcing for his estimates of wealth inequality in Europe and the US over the past 200 years. In his spreadsheets, however, there are transcription errors from the original sources and incorrect formulas. It also appears that some of the data are cherry-picked or constructed without an original source.

Now we see nothing wrong, in any case, with income or wealth inequality. (Piketty confuses the two.) We have observed that, in open societies, wherever the rich are richest, the poor are least poor.

It is the Left that wants economic equality, and wherever it has tried to establish that impossible condition it has not just failed, it has created hell on earth.

The Left swooped on Piketty’s obese compendium of wishes and errors, as a vindication of socialist theory.  (See for example the encomium by the leftist professor Paul Krugman here. He thinks Piketty has made a “masterly diagnosis” in his “superb book”.)

So we hail the FT’s revelations with more than a touch of unapologetic Schadenfreude.

In a comment today under our post The savior of socialism proves the worth of capitalism (May 20, 2014), Burro writes:

A great leap forward has just occurred!

No less than the Financial Times of London has right on it’s front page today, Saturday, an exposé of Pick-your-number’s book and the loony numbers it contains. It then proceeds to demolish most of the Socialist conclusions on page 3. …

[Piketty] has been shown to have attended the “Al Gore” school of statistics, and not only made errors of transcription, ie putting numbers in the wrong place which surprise, surprise was beneficial to HIS thesis but not the opposite, but “the [FT] investigation found numerous mistakes in [his] work: simple fat-finger errors; sub-optimal averaging techniques; multiple unexplained adjustments to the numbers; data entries with no sourcing; unexplained use of different time periods; and inconsistent uses of source data”. …

Picketty says he is “…happy to change my (ie his) conclusion” should such numbers be incorrect. …

Burro does not believe Piketty will change his conclusion or his mind. He wrote the book because he believes with fixed certainty that socialism is good.

It isn’t.

As usual, Pat Condell speaks the truth – this time about Sweden.

And this is from the New American, by Selwyn Duke:

You’re free in Sweden to be critical of immigration, those in power, or people identifying as “LBGT” [not lettuce, bacon, gunge and tomato as in a British commercial sandwich, but lesbian, bisexual, gay, transgender – ed] – at least within the confines of your mind. But dare express those views, even on the Internet, and you can now be more easily prosecuted under a new law …

The crime of ‘insult’ will be prosecuted … for giving offense to immigrants, LGBTQ persons or authorities … immigration in particular enjoying sanctified status in Sweden.

As CBN reported earlier this month in a piece entitled “Soviet Sweden? Model Nation Sliding to Third World”:

Sweden’s leftist establishment and media believe a cornerstone of their perfect society is multiculturalism — large-scale immigration from some of the poorest, most backward nations on Earth — and Swedes who disagree with that plan risk being labeled racist, fascist, even Nazi. …

This is despite the fact, say critics, that wide-scale Third World immigration is threatening Sweden’s future.

As CBN also reported:

Sweden’s immigration model is failing miserably … test scores in Swedish schools are plummeting … [and] crime in some areas has skyrocketed. Immigrants burned the Stockholm suburb of Husby for over a week last year.

Many Jews now live in fear of attacks by Muslim immigrants and are leaving. Amun Abdullahi, a journalist for Swedish radio, left last year and returned to her native Somalia after she was attacked in the Swedish media over her news report about radical Muslim immigrants in Sweden. She told Swedish television that Mogadishu was safer than immigrant areas in Stockholm.

Frontpage Mag’s Daniel Greenfield … provides even more perspective:

Sweden’s population grew from 9 million to 9.5 million in the years 2004-2012, mainly due to immigration from ‘countries like Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia.’ 16 percent of all newborns have mothers born in non-Western countries. Employment rate among immigrants: 54 percent. Sweden now has the second highest number of rapes in the world, after South Africa, which at 53.2 per 100,000 is six times higher than the United States.

Note that 77 percent of these rapes are perpetrated by “foreigners”, most of whom are Muslim, while their victims primarily are native Swedes. And these figures may very well be artificially low estimates, as the government would prefer to make the headlines go away.

And Western governments have long aimed to make politically incorrect criticism go away with tyrannical hate-speech laws.

For example, LifeSiteNews.com reports:

Chapter 15, Section 8 of Sweden’s criminal code prohibits the expression of ‘disrespect’ towards favoured minority groups. The law carries a penalty of up to four years of imprisonment. It requires no evidence of incitement to violence and lacks any objective standard for identifying ‘disrespect’.”

 …  Sweden’s new law [is]   designed to target näthatare, which, I understand, translates into “net haters.” Yet … “Sweden’s Free-Speech Charade,” hate is whatever the Swedish thought police say it is — at the particular moment in question. Here’s one example he provides:

In January 2002 … a district court sentenced neo-Nazi Fredrik Sandberg to six months in prison for publishing a Third-Reich-era pamphlet (“The Jewish Question”). But four years later, the official who initiated that case (Swedish Chancellor of Justice Göran Lambertz) discontinued an investigation into the Stockholm Central Mosque regarding its distribution of tapes that encouraged Muslims to kill Jews, described therein as “the brothers of apes and pigs.” His legal justification? “[Such statements] should be judged differently — and therefore be regarded as permissible — because they were used by one side in an ongoing and far-reaching conflict where calls to arms and insults are part of the everyday climate in the rhetoric that surrounds this conflict.”

So what is an aspiring hater to conclude? If you’re going to hate, make sure it’s habitual? Or is it something else? It appears, critics might say, that some haters are more equal than others.

Chloé Valdary, a student leader at the University of New Orleans, speaks for justice, for Ayaan Hirsi Ali and the oppressed women she champions, against the savagery of Islam, and against the narrow-mindedness, dogmatism, and heartlessness of political correctness in general and certain academic feminists at Brandeis University in particular.

Islam IS a savage ideology.

Feminism IS nugatory.

Political correctness IS bigotry.

Most non-Western peoples ARE culturally backward.

Obama knows nothing of what goes on in his own administration.

The scandals it gets itself into come as a total surprise to him.

Jean Kaufman writes about this at her blog Neo-Neocon here:

Obama says “if only Obama knew”…

… about the problems in the VA:

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney … told reporters that President Barack Obama first learned from a TV news report that his Veterans Administration was denying medical care to vets with secret off-the-books-waiting lists.

The actual quote is this; note how careful Carney is to parse his words about the “specific” reports, because he knows that the White House was told about the general problem when Obama first took office in 2008:

A CNN reporter asked Carney on Monday when the president was ‘first made aware … of these fraudulent lists that were being kept to hide the wait times’ at VA medical centers.

‘You mean the specific allegations,’ Carney asked, ‘that I think were reported first by your news network out of Phoenix, I believe?’

‘We learned about them through the reports.’

He’s a sly one, that Carney, isn’t he?

As for Obama, it’s a good thing we have the news, because otherwise he’d never learn about anything that happened under his watch:

After the Operation Fast and Furious scandal broke, Obama responded to national outrage in an interview broadcast by CNN’s John King on October 12, 2011, similarly saying he was out of the loop until he turned on his television…

A few months into his presidency, Obama’s White House approved an unannounced New York City flyover by Air Force One…It was a mistake,’ the president said on April 28, 2009, the day after the flight. ‘It was something we found out about along with all of you. And it will not happen again.’

Last year on May 14, Carney told reporters that Obama had learned about his Department of Justice seizing two months’ worth of Associated Press journalists’ phone records ‘from news reports yesterday, on the road.’

‘We don’t have any independent knowledge of that,’ Carney insisted.

That punt came just one day after Obama himself told the Washington press corps during a joint press conference with UK Prime Minister David Cameron that he was in the dark – until it hit news reports – that the Internal Revenue Service had targeted conservative nonprofit groups for special inquisitions when they applied for tax-exempt status.

‘I first learned about it from the same news reports that I think most people learned about this,’ he said in the East Room of the White House on May 13, 2013. I think it was on Friday…

Why shouldn’t Obama keep doing this? With the cooperation of the MSM, it has worked for him so far.

Sarah Palin comments:

The head of a government that has the most sophisticated spying apparatus ever created can monitor who we talk to, what we talk about, how many twinkies our kids eat and the calories we consume, where we travel, etc. etc., yet announces [his] daily Intelligence report is actually prepared by Matt Drudge.

Today we post, in our Pages section, a review of Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty. 

The review, by Don L, is titled:  The “Savior  of Socialism” Proves the Worth of Capitalism. (To go there, click on the title under Pages, at the top of our margin.)

Here is an extract :

Piketty’s Marxian monster is one nonsensical – and previously discarded – economic notion after another. He doesn’t grasp that there is no distribution of income, favorably or negatively, in a Free Market Capitalistic system. All wealth is allocated by consumers … they are kings and queens of an economy and of a truly JUST society. They determine what producer satisfies needs and wants most successfully. It’s consumer meritocracy! Nobody from General Foods ever shows up at the door with a threat of imprisonment if you don’t buy. Further, Piketty holds to the long-ago-tossed idea that capital is homogeneous. Capital is heterogeneous, and it is the putting together, by an entrepreneur, of the right combination of capital to serve consumers’ demands, in an uncertain environment, that determines profit or loss. Remember, an entrepreneur pays wages well in advance of sales revenue. There is absolutely no such thing as a guaranteed or certain rate of return on capital such as Piketty chronically and erroneously incorporates in his formulations. …

Mr Piketty’s book, except for unintentionally proving that government causes income inequality, is worthless, and his endeavor is doomed. Piketty fails to comprehend that inequality arises when government economic intervention distorts free exchange into an unnatural 3-party, buyer-seller-government, lose-lose-win by coercion, framework. He just doesn’t understand that there can never be a sufficiency of data, nor a mathematical model, by which you can emulate the free and willing, person-to-person, win-win interaction of hundreds of millions of people making trillions upon trillions of decisions about what they think is best for themselves as they allocate dollars/wealth through exchange. Governments cannot legislate or impose a false reality.

“Socialism fails because it’s based on the emotion of SHOULD.

Free Market Capitalism succeeds because it’s based on the reality of IS.”

Ludwig von Mises

The author supplies a very useful list of books at the end of the review.