George Monbiot is correct (The rich want us to believe their wealth is good for us all, 30 July) in his praise of Thomas Piketty’s proposal for a wealth tax to counteract the insane levels of inequality now generated in our world, and in pointing out that only the Green party is prepared to back this obvious idea. However, we should be careful not to let Piketty’s helpful intervention in the debate blind us to the severe limits of his own stance in political economy. I refer principally to Piketty’s utter failure to take seriously the ecological limits to growth.

A central component of Piketty’s answer to the crisis is: more of the same. More growth, the proceeds of which can then allegedly be “redistributed”. The truth however is that growth is an alternative to egalitarian redistribution, an alternative to any serious effort to create a more equal society. The promise of growth is a replacement for the need to share. It is a promise of which we should be ever more suspicious, in a world whose biological limits are being ruptured, and in a country where we are now seeing growth, none of the benefits of which are trickling down to the 99% (GDP in the UK is now above the 2007 level, but most people in the country are worse off than they were in 2007).

Piketty’s claim that a stalling of growth is bad for the majority is wrong: a stalling of growth, and a willingness to see that we can’t keep growing the pie now that the ingredients are running out, will finally be what forces the majority to take back some of the wealth being hoarded by the rich.

A wealth tax is a key component in a greener, fairer, more equal society. Its introduction will not occur until we give up our desperate attachment to the oxymorons of “green growth” and “egalitarian growth” and face up to the need to share the wealth far more equally, in a world which finally understands that perpetual growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.

Dr Rupert Read

University of East Anglia, Norwich

• One of the most shocking ways the rich are going to “get away with it” is because there is almost no mainstream exposure of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership and the final-farewell-to-democracy investor-to-state dispute settlement, negotiations over which were suspended in January this year for three months to undertake a “consultation” with the European public. Really? Given the number of people, including those of the political norm, who look blank when you mention TTIP, never mind ISDS, the consultation must have stopped short at the Channel. Where is the campaign to expose this political nightmare and stop them getting away with it?

John Airs

Liverpool

• Aditya Chakrabortty’s diagnosis of Labour’s economic policy myopia also underpins its inability to win over voters (It’s supine Labour that lets the Tories daub lipstick on a pig, 29 July). There is an inability to break with the slavish, neoliberal worship of that abstract totem, the national economy. Ed Balls et al still fixate on business elites’ and establishment economists’ dogma that the right tinkering can get the wealth machine delivering productive and well-paid jobs – ignoring the historical fact that capitalist market economies have always entailed a mass of insecure, low-paid jobs combined with semi-permanent underemployment/unemployment. Only when national economies’ links with international markets have been controlled, and state intervention properly managed, has there been anything that “benefits all working people”.

As Aditya Chakrabortty says, Labour only differs by proposing to pull a few different levers to what Balls calls “old Tory economics”. Yet inegalitarian shibboleths such as balanced budgets and corporate tax relief will be retained. Labour should, instead, propose a re-shaping of economic institutions and market-state relationships to create a fairer balance of economic power and reverse the marketisation of society. It should remember that potential supporters won’t vote for promises to create a neoliberal, smooth-running economic nirvana. The popularity of (re)nationalisation options shows that policies that put tangible mass interests ahead of those dogmas have more appeal.

The approach needs to be not what we must do for the economy but what the economy can do for us.

Bryn Jones

Bath

• George Monbiot’s admirable article misses one key argument – about the economic effect of rampant inequality. If the benefit of any growth flows to the rich they will spend it on financial assets or positional goods (expensive flats, works of art) here or abroad, with no boost to consumer demand. The rest can only add to demand if they increase their borrowing, and the poorest lose benefits to “austerity”. The effort to sustain growth by ultra-low interest rates and quantitative easing only adds to the financial overhang. Unless the rich are forced to recycle their gains by taxation, productive investment will lag, any growth will be unsustainable, debts will go on growing and the next financial crisis will be even worse than the last.

Alan Bailey

London

• I’m really enjoying the Guardian this week: on Tuesday Aditya Chakrabortty demolishes the idea that dysfunctional markets can cure themselves just by the introduction of more competition; then George Monbiot does likewise to the other arguments underlying neoliberalism (or explains how Piketty does).

Having read these articles (and Piketty) can I propose a new nosepeg strategy for the next election? The most vital issue is the need to destroy neoliberalism before it destroys our civilisation. Accordingly, we should all join whatever party is most likely to keep the Tories out, in whatever constituency we live and vote in, and work hard for that party in the remaining time leading up to the election. The Tories are of course the party most likely to continue the present disastrous course in the short term.

Thereafter we should all join the Green party and work for them, since they are the only party with a sufficiently radical positive strategy in the long term.

Jeremy Cushing

Exeter

• Brilliant article by George Monbiot. As always, shines a light on the poisonous neoliberal world in which we live. And how deliciously ironic of the Guardian to run a three-page advertisement of one of the richest men in England [David Beckham] promoting his expensive “grooming aid”.

Thanks, George, I signed up for the Green party today.

David Halley

Hampton Hill, Middlesex