Washington Post

Michael Lewis’s “Flash Boys,” his takedown of high-speed stock trading, may be making headlines this week, but it’s just one of two books on our economic dysfunctions that are flying off the shelves. While “Flash Boys” explains how the fastest-growing form of trading enriches the few at the expense of the many, the other book, Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” provides a more fundamental and disquieting explanation: how capitalism itself enriches the few at the expense of the many.

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As a general rule, more Americans work than do the citizens of other advanced economies. Since the late 1970s, when the number of women in the workforce ballooned, the share of Americans who either had jobs or were trying to get one was greater than the share of comparable Europeans. For reasons good and bad — the higher availability of jobs, the need to bolster stagnating incomes, the linkage of jobs to health insurance — Americans worked like the dickens.

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In light of Russia’s military movement into Crimea, it’s a good thing that the United States repudiated the Monroe Doctrine. In 1823, to deter European powers from military or political intervention in the emerging nations of Latin America, President James Monroe announced a policy implying that that region was our sphere of influence, not Europe’s. The United States invoked the Monroe Doctrine, along with the imperatives of the Cold War, to justify some of its own interventions there: in Cuba, Panama, Nicaragua, Chile, Grenada, the Dominican Republic, Venezuela — it’s a long list.

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As patriotism can be the last refuge of scoundrels, so religion can be the last refuge of bigots.

The most recent attempts to besmirch religion have come from Arizona’s Republican state legislators, who last week, on a near- party-line vote, passed a bill allowing businesses to discriminate against same-sex couples on religious grounds. The bill is on the desk of Republican Gov. Jan Brewer; she has until week’s end to sign or veto it.

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The United Auto Workers’ failure to organize the employees at Volkswagen’s plant in Chattanooga, Tenn., has been greeted with predictable hosannas from the sworn enemies of American unions. Survey their celebratory columns, though, and you won’t find the slightest consideration of most Americans’ primary economic problem: How do workers get a raise in today’s economy? With the rate of unionization so low that even unionized employees have trouble winning good contracts, how can workers profit from the gains in their productivity? What will it take for workers to regain the power to reap what they sow?

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In a well-intentioned op-ed in The Post [“Dialing up the power in people’s phone calls,” op-ed, Feb. 9], Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales recently extolled his new phone venture, which has pledged to devote a quarter of its profits to “good causes” selected by an independent foundation. Now, I support good causes as much as the next fellow, and I have nothing negative to say about this initiative. I am compelled, however, to note that in delineating the obligations that corporations must meet, Wales made an error at once so common and so fundamental that it screams for correction.

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