Some emphasize getting a large economic payday, allowing them to join the
rentier class and achieve permanent economic security.
Housing benefit is an unaffordable scam, a giant public handout to a propertyowning
rentier class fleecing the Treasury and tenants.
The nineteenth-century European bourgeoisie was a largely
rentier class, and few questioned their work effort.
As French economist Thomas Piketty has empirically shown in Capital in the Twenty-First Century, the West is lurching back to a past where society can be divided into two distinct classes: a
rentier class who live of off the proceeds of their capital assets and everyone else who works for a living, often making meager and falling wages unless they're fortunate enough to be pulling down the "supersalaries" of America's financial elite.
Instead of a growing
rentier class that shoved its way ever upward, he said that the luxuries of today become tomorrow's necessities.
In Lebanon, the
rentier class wealth was buoyed by the rising return on financial capital since 1992 fuelled by public debt rise -- if we had data on wealth since 1993, I conjecture that it would show a significant rise in the wealth-to-income ratio in Lebanon after the end of the civil war -- and by the rise in real estate prices since 2007.
In Picketty's thinking, this tendency leads to a condition in which entrepreneurs become a
rentier class that dominates those who own only their own labor.
This meant that a major category of financial industry profit--buying, selling, and speculating in Treasury bonds--was eliminated, at the expense of the
rentier class.
This is similar to what happens in many poorer states with a great deal of natural resources, where a
rentier class develops and maintains itself without providing services to the population.
The new capitalist class that has emerged under the NEP may be a
rentier class, he argues, but this concern is relevant only to the extent that it has detracted from reducing poverty and income inequality.
Just as, in Voltaire's phrase, the rich require an abundant supply of the poor, so too does the
rentier class require an abundant supply of debtors.
However you look at it--welfare for the
rentier class, a legal mare's-nest that will enrich lawyers, a deficit deepener--Bush's tax-cut plan is a lousy idea.
