 French economist Thomas Piketty has made a big splash with his book, Capital in the 21st Century. In this book, he tries to make the case that there's growing economic inequality in the western world, specifically the United States and Europe. Now, Austrians, of course, would disagree with this general proposition, and especially Piketty's call for a world wealth tax and higher marginal tax rates on income in the United States. And generally speaking, rising economic inequality is actually associated with prosperity and economic growth. And during these periods of time, the lower income classes are not worse off, they're actually better off. In one case, Thomas Piketty shows the change in income distribution in the United States, where he shows that in 1971, the top 10% of income earners earned 33% of total income in the United States. And by 2011, the top 10% of income earners earned 48% or almost half of all income. But of course, the people who were in the top 10% in 1971 were not the same top 10 people in 2011. As a matter of fact, they were almost an entirely different group. So what caused this change in income distribution? Were the top 10% now taking in almost 50% of all income instead of one third? Was it perhaps the opening of the Nasdaq composite stock market in 1971? I don't think so. Was it the U.S. ending its embargo on China? Again, that doesn't seem plausible. Or maybe it was the constitutional amendment that lowered the voting age from 21 to 18. Now, all of the events of 1971 have very little impact on income distribution in the American economy. However, on August 15, 1971, Richard Nixon closed the gold window, abandoned the gold standard, and put us on a system of paper fiat money and inflation. And Austrians know that paper money and inflation help the big banks, they help the financial classes, they help government contractors, and paper money and inflation hurt wage earners, laborers, and savers in the economy. So the turn towards paper money and inflation is a real cause of this growing disparity in income outcomes in the U.S. economy. And therefore a return to the gold standard would give us stable economic values, would give us a stable monetary unit, and would address and eliminate this subsidy to the big banks and to the financial classes. And that's the Mises View.