Correction, 1.8 billion should read, 1.8 trillion.
Sincere apologies.
Rhrosty.

As time goes by there will be winding down of the economy and a change
to localisation of everything.
There are pages of waffle published every day about the economy and
how to get an improvement in growth.
Until there is a fundamental understanding of the relationship of
the cost of energy and its availability to the level of economic
activity we will continue to waffle on while the ship continues taking on water.

Localisation of our economies does not mean we cannot live fully happy
and fulfilling lives.
It will be a different life to a late 20th century life but may well
be a more equal and more generally satisfactory.

The difficulty in getting there is that there are many powerful
interests who just cannot accept that such a change is inevitable.
The more they resist the greater will be the trauma of the change.
For a satisfactory change system read up on the Transition Town Movement

Rent seekers and parasites are bringing their worst to the argument, and Piketty is balm to their invidious ideas.

Piketty and his supporters deserve the fate of Ceusescu and Mussolini; their bad ideas have been proven not just wrong, but rancid. They lead to economic misery for the masses.

Trickle down is not a theory it's a sneer. The poor of all the world have been made better off by the innovations of capitalism and world trade, even held in the chains of Government and its parasite classes. Cuba and North Korea remain in poverty to show what Socialism does, but nowhere is there both full economic freedom and sound rule of law to show what people are really capable of.

Leaving Piketty aside -or out completely as largely irrelevant- it should never be forgotten that economics is essentially about scarcity. An 'economical' car for instance is one which uses little (or 'scarce') fuel. Egregious wealth for the precious few may be affordable in times of plenty, but when things get scarce these few can bid up prices to the point where the peasants are left to eat (non-existent) cake.
As for “ethical basis”, there are two ways of looking at wealth creation. If you believe that the creation of wealth is limited only by human imagination, then we are all reliant on those creators. If however you believe real wealth is inextricably tied to availability of resources, then the more one person takes, the less is left for everyone else; particularly as we live in a credit based society, where new money can only be introduced by incurring debt.
IOW, for every new billionaire the world must go into debt for a billion dollars.
While it is certainly true that entrepreneurs create employment, which in turn creates products and tax dollars, far from creating 'wealth' the obscenely rich actually create spiralling levels of debt which is largely carried by future generations, in the form of ongoing inflation.
The world's physical resources are limited. At the same time as we already exceed our resource budget, (http://www.footprintnetwork.org/en/index.php/GFN/page/earth_overshoot_day/) the human population is still growing, and people in third world countries are -not unreasonably- wishing to enjoy the lifestyles of wealthier countries...
Times of growing scarcity seem inevitable.
As to the mention of Communism, this is a bit of a red herring; Party Members invariably managed to do alright for themselves, and China has a remarkable number of billionaires. A truly competitive free market (combined with industrial democracy) should be much more effective at regulation of wealth -if it were not for the anti-competitive practice of buying out (merging with,destroying) competition, thus creating market monsters.

As Tim Worstall has pointed out many times, the figures for income inequality are always quoted on a before-tax basis. Once taxation and welfare benefits are taken into account, they come down to a much more reasonable level. But the proponents of 'equality' never mention this -- I wonder why?

http://www.timworstall.com/2010/10/19/proving-the-hills-report-on-wealth-inequality-entirely-wrong/

If everyone's assets were equalised overnight, discrepancies would reappear by the following morning. A few games of poker, a little bit of prostitution, someone who knows how to make a good breakfast selling the results -- it wouldn't take very long to re-establish a gulf between people whose efforts are worth more than average and the rest. And although the individuals involved might be different, I'm betting that the wealth profile would end up pretty much the same, as it has in every society we have records of since the beginning of time.

Now, of course, our poor live in three-bedroom houses instead of mud huts and bark shanties. The technological development that has made this possible resulted from inequality, among other things. A person who invents a new method or device does so on the assumption that this is going to make them richer than their peers. Remove that, and why should they bother?

As the former citizens of the USSR and its satellites can testify, life without a profit motive is bleak indeed. A world of equality is a world with no motivation to improve.

Graham, you're attempting to defend the indefensible.

There's informative article in today's online Age by Joseph Stiglitz--

"Why Australia must not follow the US"

Neo-liberalism is a toxic ideology imported from the US and serves mainly corporate rentiers, if we apply it in this country, social democracy is dead. Neo-liberalism doesn't even produce improved economic performances, it's the ideology of the plutocrat.