Gyroscopic Investing

Craig, you are so off base on Marx. I can't blame you though, there has been so much propaganda surrounding the man that its hard to seperate Marx from the myths and lies that surround him.

If you want to keep with you hyperbolic misinformation though, that is up to you. You might disagree with Marx's critique of capitalism, but again, there is as much connection between Marx and Mao, as there is between Jesus and the Spanish Inquisition.

Marx in many cases was quite complementary of capitalism:

(Referring to Capitalism) No other social system in history, he wrote, had proved so revolutionary. In a mere handful of centuries, the capitalist middle classes had erased almost every trace of their feudal foes from the face of the earth. They had piled up cultural and material treasures, invented human rights, emancipated slaves, toppled autocrats, dismantled empires, fought and died for human freedom, and laid the basis for a truly global civilization. No document lavishes such florid compliments on this mighty historical achievement as The Communist Manifesto, not even The Wall Street Journal.

doodle wrote: Craig, you are so off base on Marx. I can't blame you though, there has been so much propaganda surrounding the man that its hard to seperate Marx from the myths and lies that surround him.

I don't care what platitudes he gave. The guy's ideas were junk and resulted in untold misery.

There is no debating it on a board devoted to Harry Browne. I'm not as diplomatic as Harry Browne would be because I think Karl Marx is an evil idiot and will flat out say it: He was an evil idiot. I mean that literally. The guy was evil and an idiot. A difficult feat to pull off, but somehow he managed to do it.

Arguing for Karl Marx here would be like going to a Orthodox Jewish forum and talking about the good parts of Mein Kampf. I've not said much in the past, but I will now. I think that understanding Karl Marx should only be done to get a grasp on how not to approach the ideas of economics and human nature. He is the bad example. I certainly wouldn't go around quoting the guy any more than I'd go around quoting Adolf Hitler.

I always thought this article on The Onion summed up Marxism really well:

http://www.theonion.com/articles/marxis ... does,1382/

I only wish people that thought Marx was a genius would impose it on themselves first instead of the rest of humanity.

LifestyleFreedom wrote:

doodle wrote: That is the Hegelian Dialectic and it forms a big part of Marx's theories of how history progresses. Thesis --> antithesis --> synthesis (which now forms new thesis for the process to start a new.)

I've always thought of this process as the Law of Unintended Consequences.  For example, Congress decides to eliminate a loophole in the tax code and in the process, created two or more new loopholes that wealthy people (with their tax lawyers) can figure out how to exploit.  Or Congress decides to make it easier for more people to own their own home and in the process, people who cannot really afford a home figure out how to game the system (for example, "NINJA" loans -- no income, no job, no assets).

Right...same thing more or less. Except Hegel saw history as one of forward progress. The solution according to libertarians is not to fix anything, but simply adopt their religious precepts and humanity will be eternally saved.

craigr wrote: I always thought this article on The Onion summed up Marxism really well:

http://www.theonion.com/articles/marxis ... does,1382/

I only wish people that thought Marx was a genius would impose it on themselves first instead of the rest of humanity.

If you are using the Onion as your lens through which you interpret Marx I can see where your confusion regarding the man might come from.

I only wish people who thought Jesus was the savior would live by his precepts themselves before imposing them on the rest of humanity.

Don't conflate Marx with Lenin, or Stalin, or Mao. Marx was a political economist and philosopher. He was a thinker and his critique and analysis of capitalism "Das Kapital" is a book that every intelligent person should take the time to understand just as they should try to similarly investigate the ideas of Von Mises or Hayek. That is intellectual honesty and that is nuanced thinking.

The world today is full of loud mouthed ideologues who all think they have the answers. The reality as I am learning unfortunately is that this world is one hell of a complicated place. There are no absolute answers, only nuanced ones.

doodle wrote:If you are using the Onion as your lens through which you interpret Marx I can see where your confusion regarding the man might come from.

The only lens needed is the huge pile of dead bodies Marxism left behind. Honestly, it's 2012 why do people still argue for Marx? I don't go around reading stuff from the Flat Earth Society. Nor do I go around talking about the soft gentle side of Hitler's philosophy. He was a socialist too, by the way.

Don't conflate Marx with Lenin, or Stalin, or Mao. Marx was a political economist and philosopher. He was a thinker and his critique and analysis of capitalism "Das Kapital" is a book that every intelligent person should take the time to understand just as they should try to similarly investigate the ideas of Von Mises or Hayek. That is intellectual honesty and that is nuanced thinking.

I'm familiar with his work. And he doesn't know what he's talking about. His ideas are all wrong. Lenin, Stalin, Mao were the raw expressions of his ideals. He enabled control freaks to kill, starve and enslave millions. That's Marx. There is no "nuanced" way to implement Marxism. It will always result in the same outcome. It's like arguing against gravity.

Thanks for saying all that Craig.

Why is Marx still popular?  If you're not a liberal when you're young....

craigr wrote:

doodle wrote:If you are using the Onion as your lens through which you interpret Marx I can see where your confusion regarding the man might come from.

The only lens needed is the huge pile of dead bodies Marxism left behind. Honestly, it's 2012 why do people still argue for Marx? I don't go around reading stuff from the Flat Earth Society. Nor do I go around talking about the soft gentle side of Hitler's philosophy. He was a socialist too, by the way.

Don't conflate Marx with Lenin, or Stalin, or Mao. Marx was a political economist and philosopher. He was a thinker and his critique and analysis of capitalism "Das Kapital" is a book that every intelligent person should take the time to understand just as they should try to similarly investigate the ideas of Von Mises or Hayek. That is intellectual honesty and that is nuanced thinking.

I'm familiar with his work. And he doesn't know what he's talking about. His ideas are all wrong. Lenin, Stalin, Mao were the raw expressions of his ideals. He enabled control freaks to kill, starve and enslave millions. That's Marx. There is no "nuanced" way to implement Marxism. It will always result in the same outcome. It's like arguing against gravity.

Yeah.... You are totally wrong on all counts. Chalk another tally up on the scoreboard for non-nuanced thinking.

Was capitalism responsible for imperialism? Did Jesus cause the Inquisition?

Do you not see the errors in your connection between Marx and Stalin? Stalin took Marx and did the same thing that the Pope did with Bible during the Inquisition. Do you condemn Jesus in the same manner that you condemn Marx? Because according to your logic they are the SAME.

Benko wrote: Thanks for saying all that Craig.

Why is Marx still popular?  If you're not a liberal when you're young....

If you're not set in your ways when you're old....

I'm not advocating for Communism by the way....and Marx spent very little time constructing a vision for a post capitalist society. What Marx concerned himself with was the analysis and critique of capitalism. You would know that if you took the effort and time (which is considerable) to read and try to understand him. But, it is always easier to read the Onion....Geez o' flip.

This forum is bad for my blood pressure. 

doodle wrote:Do you not see the errors in your connection between Marx and Stalin? Stalin took Marx and did the same thing that the Pope did with Bible during the Inquisition. Do you condemn Jesus in the same manner that you condemn Marx? Because according to your logic they are the SAME.

Look there is no use debating this. Show me *one* example where Marx's ideas didn't result in untold death and destruction? Just one? This is the same thing Marxists always use to defend failure: "Well they did Marxism the wrong way!"

Sure they did.

So we've had multiple people say they'd do it the "right" way and it always ends the same.

I'm in Latin America now, a place that has been totally screwed up due to Marx in many countries. I'm not interested in hearing these platitudes and how "nuanced" the guy was. I want results. The results so far have been pathetic. Every single freaking time they've sucked.

So don't read Marx except as an example on how not to do things. He's an idiot. I can't prove a negative (that he sucks in all cases). I can only see that he sucks in virtually every case his ideas have been tried.

It's not about reading The Onion. I've read Marx. And my deeply schooled conclusion is that he's a moron. Especially when you consider how every time someone tried to implement his ideas they've failed.

So really these people talking about Marx bear the burden of responsibility for proving he was right. As of now, I have a pile of millions of dead bodies and worthless economies that say they're wrong. I don't care how sensible he sounds. The people claiming the Earth was flat were sensible too, but they were wrong. What have the Marxists got outside of conceited proclamations about "nuanced" thinking from this idiot? Nothing. The ideas have failed 100% of the time.

Benko wrote: Why is Marx still popular?

He's only popular with people that don't have to live in Marxist economies.

Simonjester wrote:

craigr wrote:

doodle wrote:Do you not see the errors in your connection between Marx and Stalin? Stalin took Marx and did the same thing that the Pope did with Bible during the Inquisition. Do you condemn Jesus in the same manner that you condemn Marx? Because according to your logic they are the SAME.

Look there is no use debating this. Show me *one* example where Marx's ideas didn't result in untold death and destruction? Just one? This is the same thing Marxists always use to defend failure: "Well they did Marxism the wrong way!"

Sure they did.

So we've had multiple people say they'd do it the "right" way and it always ends the same.

I'm in Latin America now, a place that has been totally fucked up due to Marx in many countries. I'm not interested in hearing these platitudes and how "nuanced" the guy was. I want results. The results so far have been pathetic. Every single freaking time they've sucked.
So don't read Marx except as an example on how not to do things. He's an idiot. I can't prove a negative (that he sucks in all cases). I can only see that he sucks in virtually every case his ideas have been tried.
It's not about reading The Onion. I've read Marx. And my deeply schooled conclusion is that he's a moron. Especially when you consider how every time someone tried to implement his ideas they've failed.
So really these people talking about Marx bear the burden of responsibility for proving he was right. As of now, I have a pile of millions of dead bodies and worthless economies that say they're wrong. I don't care how sensible he sounds. The people claiming the Earth was flat were sensible too, but they were wrong. What have the Marxists got outside of conceited proclamations about "nuanced" thinking from this idiot? Nothing. The ideas have failed 100% of the time.

well said.
i have no idea of how such a failure can hang on with so much tenacity, how it can be viewed with such high regard as "academically brilliant" and be abjectly hated by anyone with the good fortune to escape a Communist regime...

When I hear people quoting Marx I get angry. They inevitably are people that never had to live under Marxist regimes. But you know I haven't lived under Marxist systems either, and never will. Simply because I can read history and understand human nature and economics enough to know it will never work. If I ever lived in a country that came out and adopted overt Marxist economic beliefs I would immediately move. Even if that meant losing everything. This is because I know the outcome would be death, misery and despair. I'd rather start over from scratch than risk myself or my family living under Marxist delusions.

Karl Marx was an idiot. I have no other way to put it. It's possible he was an evil idiot I as posted. But mostly, he was an idiot. Possibly a control freak idiot, but still the idiot component is there.

We should be debating whether Marx was an accidental idiot or an evil idiot. That would be a more useful discussion than whether he was right or wrong. I think the debate on whether he was right or wrong has already been settled in the number of mass graves left behind.

Simonjester wrote: i feel about the same way, i have family that has lived under Communism and guess what .... they have NO (zero zip Nada zilch) story's about how good it was, and hundreds of story's about the ways it failed and caused suffering...

As I said before, Marx was primarily concerned with understanding the historic development of capitalism and how the capitalist mode of production functioned. "Capital" is therefore concerned with DESCRIBING and critiquing the capitalist economic mode of production. Anyone who is interested in the capitalistic mode of production would be well served to read Marx. He was an incredibly deep thinker and very well schooled in classical economics...most of that which is attributed to Marx, he never said or advocated. You have to remember that two of the world's biggest propaganda engines...The United States and Russia both got a hold of the man's work and muddled and confused absolutely everything. In many cases Marx is hard to distinguish from other classical economists.

Just for fun...take this little quiz on "Who said it...Karl Marx or Adam Smith." See how well you score 

http://money.howstuffworks.com/adam-smith-karl-marx-quiz.htm

doodle wrote: As I said before, Marx was primarily concerned with understanding the historic development of capitalism and how the capitalist mode of production functioned. "Capital" is therefore concerned with DESCRIBING and critiquing the capitalist economic mode of production.

But his critiques lead to wrong conclusions. When you follow Adam Smith you end up with the United States. When you follow Karl Marx you end up with backwards states like the Soviet Union, Cuba, China (pre-reforms), North Korea, Venezuela, etc.

Now we can argue that these countries did not do Marx "The Right Way(™)" But I'll just note that despite everyone's best efforts, Marxist ideas always end up in similar straits. There is no "Right Way(™)" to implement them.

There are much better economists to read over Marx to understand free markets.

I'm not saying that Karl Marx has the answer to anything. I'm saying that his analysis and critique of capitalism are very detailed and well thought out. The man was an intellectual powerhouse and his ideas are worth trying to understand if only from a historical standpoint. To compare Marx to Hitler is totally ridiculous. You have got to put the propaganda behind you if you really want to uncover the truth.

With regards to Marx's relevance to today...do these statistics not strike you as relevant to his analysis of capitalism? 

The richest 10% of the U.S. population owns over 80% of all stocks almost 90% of all the bonds. Since owning the stocks and bonds of companies means owning their "means of production," we can see that the wealth producing capital of the U.S. is almost all owned by the top tenth of the population. It also means that in order to make a living, most of the other 90% must work for these richest 10% and their managers.

Additionally, for the past two decades, the U.S. working classes have experienced a dramatic decline in their own income, relative to that of the owners for whom they work. One interesting way to measure this relatively declining lot of the workers is this: in 1965, CEOs made 44 times the average factory worker's wages, and today CEOs make 326 times as much as their average workers. These changing fortunes for the owners and workers in U.S. capitalism are some examples of what Marx meant by the inherent struggle between workers and capitalists.


Karl Marx quotes that Craig would like:

For the bureaucrat, the world is a mere object to be manipulated by him.

If anything is certain, it is that I myself am not a Marxist.

Necessity is blind until it becomes conscious. Freedom is the consciousness of necessity.

Experience praises the most happy the one who made the most people happy.

The production of too many useful things results in too many useless people.

The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future.

The product of mental labor - science - always stands far below its value, because the labor-time necessary to reproduce it has no relation at all to the labor-time required for its original production.

doodle wrote: Government is such as easy punching bag for the private sector...when anything goes wrong it is so easy to toss all the blame their way. I rather think the interconnected and myriad variables in the system are a wee bit too complex to so easily lay blame on one actor.

If it's too complex to lay blame on one actor, then isn't it too complex to praise one actor?

And yet you said, "I tend to think Bernanke is the only person in Washington who has done anything to help stop the financial crisis from becoming the second great depression."

Seems like a double standard to me.

Can't think of anyone else is Washington other than Bernanke who has really done diddly squat.

Doodle...

Do you think Marx was the Son of God, Messenger of God, God himself? I ask because you sure seem to be quite the evangelist for Marx. Furthermore, you made several analogies to Jesus and his followers.

Frankly, your fervor seems religiously inspired....like St. Paul saw the blinding light? What is the basis of your devotion? Have you investigated the ideas of Von Mises or Hayek, as you suggested, and found them lacking?

murphy_p_t wrote: Doodle...

Do you think Marx was the Son of God, Messenger of God, God himself? I ask because you sure seem to be quite the evangelist for Marx. Furthermore, you made several analogies to Jesus and his followers.

Frankly, your fervor seems religiously inspired....like St. Paul saw the blinding light? What is the basis of your devotion? Have you investigated the ideas of Von Mises or Hayek, as you suggested, and found them lacking?

Need sleeeep....anyways before I turn in. No I don't think Marx is the son of god....we are all the sons of god, like Jesus told us we were before Paul and the church hid that little tidbit away. Anyways, that is another topic entirely.

My fervor for Marx is that I think he wrote a very good analysis and critique of capitalism. Unlike a lot of people here, I see the good and the bad of capitalism (as did Marx). I'm not advocating for communism as I don't think that system would work, but I'm not going to say that a totally free market capitalistic system is going to result in a healthy society. If you ask me, I think the libertarian view of the world is much more akin to a religious utopia than socialism.

I used to be a rabid libertarian. I consumed CATO institute articles like they were the gospel. I am familiar with Hayek and Von Mises from snippets I have read and scholarly articles on their work, but I haven't read any of their books in their entirety. I have been meaning to pick up Hayeks Road to Serfdom. Maybe I'll do that this week!

Never stop questioning and exploring....I'm always on the lookout for new ideas and ways of seeing things.

Doodle,

I know that you have noble intentions. But trying to explain the nuances of what Marx actually wrote about isn't a good use of your time. People like simple binary pairs. Some people want Marx to be their devil. Let them have that.

I have driven myself crazy trying to explain my views on countless contrarian viewpoints, but sometimes it just doesn't matter.

Inevitably the person arguing for Marx will state something to the effect of:

1) Marx's ideas failed because people who tried them before did not follow them correctly.
2) We can try it again and this time it will work.

But many people have tried his core philosophies and they just don't work. His critiques on Capitalism do not matter much because his ways to "fix" things were so much worse in virtually every aspect. In particular, as shown empirically, big problems with Marxism are:

Humans like owning what they make and want to decide how to share it.
Humans do not want be told what to do and have their property taken from them by force.
Some humans are lazy and have no problem taking from others more than they contribute.
Some humans like controlling others for no other reason than to control them.
Some humans like abusing their power over others when given that authority out of envy/jealousy/greed.
Humans are learning creatures and will adapt to systems they think are abusing their nature by doing less work or simply moving somewhere else.
Etc.

These are not small issues. They are major problems and reflect Marx's profound errors about reality. There is nothing nuanced to understand about the issue really. We have tons of empirical evidence at this point that Marx was very much wrong about a great deal of things that were core philosophies.

Frankly, I'm surprised people even debate this stuff any more. It's not about CATO vs. Marx. Etc. It's that we have this huge body of evidence that shows Marxism, despite the best intentions, results in much worse agony than anything free market systems have done.

Humans like owning what they make and want to decide how to share it.

This was one of Marxs biggest problems with capitalism. He called it worker alienation. Workers lose control of the product of their labor. You are describing a problem with capitalism.

Alienation (Entfremdung) is the systemic result of living in a socially stratified society, because being a mechanistic part of a social class alienates a person from his and her humanity. The theoretic basis of alienation within the capitalist mode of production is that the worker invariably loses the ability to determine his or her life and destiny, when deprived of the right to think (conceive) of himself as the director of his actions; to determine the character of said actions; to define his relationship with other people; and to own the things and use the value of the goods and services, produced with his labour. Although the worker is an autonomous, self-realised human being, as an economic entity, he or she is directed to goals and diverted to activities that are dictated by the bourgeoisie, who own the means of production, in order to extract from the worker the maximal amount of surplus value, in the course of business competition among industrialists.


I think you might want to read Marx. Does he have the ANSWER, no. No one has the answer. But, your views on him seem to be taken from cold war propaganda films. He is a much more subtle and deeper thinker than you give him credit for. Many of his ideas are still very relevant today.

Or, you could just make him the devil as Melvyr said and stay with that binary type of thinking. If that is the case melvyrs right, it is a waste of time to have a discussion.

doodle wrote:

Humans like owning what they make and want to decide how to share it.

This was one of Marxs biggest problems with capitalism. He called it worker alienation. Workers lose control of the product of their labor. You are describing a problem with capitalism.

And he was again, wrong. If you work for a factory putting tires on cars it probably is not a concern for you that you can't stock up on tires.

However it is probably a concern whether you are paid enough to buy other things that other people also produce. So if the wage can accomplish that, who cares if you "lose control" over the widget you are building each day. How many tires, watches, TVs, etc. does someone making those items need?

I think you might want to read Marx. Does he have the ANSWER, no. No one has the answer. But, your views on him seem to be taken from cold war propaganda films. He is a much more subtle and deeper thinker than you give him credit for. Many of his ideas are still very relevant today.

This morning I just suffered through Marx's Communist Manifesto again. I have read Marx in the past mainly due to college professor's requirements. I have had this particular book on my Kindle for some time as a general reference (filed under "Bad Philosophy"). Budding Marxists will be happy to know that I made sure to get a free version so that the revolutionary that formatted it for the Kindle wouldn't receive any compensation for their effort. I figured it's the spirit of things, right?

Or, you could just make him the devil as Melvyr said and stay with that binary type of thinking. If that is the case melvyrs right, it is a waste of time to have a discussion.

I don't need to say anything to make Marx the devil, the guy does a pretty good job himself. Frankly, after re-reading him I have a hard time deciding on something.

You see, earlier I simply stated that I think Marx is an evil idiot. But I may have been wrong. He may in fact be a brilliant satirist but nobody got the joke. They instead decided to implement his ideas and lay waste to large bodies of people instead.

From his Communist Manifesto:

Owing to the extensive use of machinery and to division of labour, the work of the proletarians has lost all individual character, and consequently, all charm for the workman. He becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is required of him.

Ok so he is a Luddite and thinks we should go back in time to plow fields by hand and live with subsistence farming? Or that it was "charming" to do back breaking labor all day instead of relying on machines and division of labor to increase production and reduce costs of products so more people can afford them? He makes no sense.

The Communists, therefore, are on the one hand, practically, the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties of every country, that section which pushes forward all others; on the other hand, theoretically, they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement.

What nonsense. Marx existed under privileged conditions proclaiming he speaks for the masses.

The distinguishing feature of Communism is not the abolition of property generally, but the abolition of bourgeois property...
In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.

All property is taken. Anyone who owns one penny more than another is considered "bourgeoisie" as it always works this way. Marxism is a philosophy of envy, not a philosophy of life. And with no private property you get no responsibility for anything because there is no sense of ownership. You take the problem of the Tragedy of the Commons and smear it across an entire economy down to the lowest level.

And the abolition of this state of things is called by the bourgeois, abolition of individuality and freedom! And rightly so. The abolition of bourgeois individuality, bourgeois independence, and bourgeois freedom is undoubtedly aimed at. By freedom is meant, under the present bourgeois conditions of production, free trade, free selling and buying. But if selling and buying disappears, free selling and buying disappears also. This talk about free selling and buying, and all the other "brave words" of our bourgeoisie about freedom in general, have a meaning, if any, only in contrast with restricted selling and buying, with the fettered traders of the Middle Ages, but have no meaning when opposed to the Communistic abolition.

So who is going to manage this brave new economy of no private property, no buying and selling, etc? Answer: Petty murderous control-freaks. That's always what happens.

Communism deprives no man of the power to appropriate the products of society; all that it does is to deprive him of the power to subjugate the labour of others by means of such appropriation.

Ok. But you can't make people work and invent things if they don't want to. You can order them into a field to plow it manually with hoes and back-breaking labor, but you can't force them to invent modern agricultural machinery and methods to do it far more efficiently. This is why the Soviet Union imported tons of grain from the U.S. and not the other way around.

It has been objected that upon the abolition of private property all work will cease, and universal laziness will overtake us.

Yeah. That's pretty much exactly what happened in communist economies.

According to this, bourgeois society ought long ago to have gone to the dogs through sheer idleness; for those of its members who work, acquire nothing, and those who acquire anything, do not work.

This guy has obviously never run a business. Business owners work harder than any employee I can guarantee it. They also take on far more financial and personal risk. Again, he espouses politics of envy, not success.

He then goes on about the need to destroy the family as another evil outgrowth of the capitalist system:

The bourgeois clap-trap about the family and education, about the hallowed co-relation of parent and child, becomes all the more disgusting, the more, by the action of Modern Industry, all family ties among the proletarians are torn asunder, and their children transformed into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labour.

The charges against Communism made from a religious, a philosophical, and, generally, from an ideological standpoint, are not deserving of serious examination.

This is because he can't argue to defend them as Marx was a very bad thinker. The charges levied against Communism were all correct.

The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible.

Didn't happen. Productive capacity collapses under command economies. People starve. People get hauled off to re-education and slave labor camps. People try to leave but are kept in forcibly in the "worker's paradise."

I could go on, but what is the point? He was wrong on virtually everything he stated about how communism would work, the mechanisms how it would come about, and how humans would react to it on all levels.

Again though I'm having a hard time deciding whether Marx really was all just satire that went horribly wrong.

craigr wrote: I always thought this article on The Onion summed up Marxism really well:

http://www.theonion.com/articles/marxis ... does,1382/

I only wish people that thought Marx was a genius would impose it on themselves first instead of the rest of humanity.

Interestingly enough, I actually lived like that for two years in college during my Marxist phase. Eventually that living arrangement cracked because sharing everything was stressful and bred resentment, and fell apart because net consumers outnumbered the net producers once two of the producers moved away.

I've read a ton of Marx, and I was very enamored of him and his writings for a while. I see what doodle is saying about his descriptions of capitalism vs the implementation of his ideas by others, and it's important to acknowledge.

But the thing is, even outside his chilling and obviously dangerous policy prescriptions laid out in the The Communist Manifesto, Marx was wrong about a lot of things. As incisive as his descriptions may be in many ways, there are several really big things he got wrong.

Doodle, you quoted a statistic about the richest 10% owning 80% of the stocks and 90% of the bonds. I am not in the richest 10%, yet I own both stocks and bonds and also provide wage labor to a corporation. In fact, I own stock in that same corporation. Sooooo… am I a worker, or an owner? Both? Am I diverting capital away from worker-me and towards owner-me? Am I oppressing myself? Marx did not conceive of someone being both a worker and an owner. How does that clean break between worker and owner apply to one who owns his own business (as I do)? Am I again both a worker and an owner? The idea of owners oppressing workers breaks down for people that can be both.

Another major problem was that he discounted the dynamism of the creative destruction of capitalism. If technological change stayed fixed, then I would expect Marx to be right that gradually a smaller number of conglomerates eventually owned nearly everything. But these conglomerates are slow to innovate and adapt, and they can get their lunch eaten by newer, smaller, nimbler firms that understand consumer desires better than the big behemoth. Everyone said Microsoft was a monopoly… until Google beat them on the web, Linux beat them on the server side, and Apple rose from the ashes to beat them in mobile devices. A smaller, more nimbler Microsoft in fact did the same thing in the 80s to IBM, who at the time everyone knew was a monopoly. Your hypothetical "steady-state" economy would probably be more problematic in this respect as the innovation required to topple entrenched firms slowed to a trickle.

You might want to read Marx with more of a critical eye. These guys didn't get everything right! If they did, nobody would have come along after them to keep writing stuff. I  thought Hayek and Von Mises were the shit for a long time until I learned MR and realized that a some of what they wrote only really apply in a gold standard economy. Harry Browne is amazing… but the parts of his writings about women are a little off-kilter and seem to reveal personal traumas that not everyone will acquire.

You have to take it all with a grain of salt. Don't assume you have all the answers today. Think back to the recent past when you thought you previously had all the answers. Isn't it as likely now as it was then that you're still on an intellectual journey? It's not gonna stop at Marx, I'll tell you that! 

Craig,

I would say that Capital is a much better and accurate read than the Communist Manifesto which was written in a revolutionary time in Europe as a rallying document to unite workers. It was bombastic and hyperbolic on purpose....like a political speech meant to rally a group of people.

Irregardless of what Marx was incorrect about in his assumptions on human behavior, that doesn't deny the value of his analysis and critique of capitalism.

The reality is that there is no system that is perfect. They all have advantages and problems. Capitalism has many benefits and advantages...Marx himself lauded capitalism for its productive an innovative abilities. But man is not a machine. There are features of capitalism that are problematic with man's nature and if you are intellectually honest you will acknowledge those problems.

Just so everyone doesn't think I'm a dyed in the wool Marxist. I've started looking into something called Thoreauvian Self Sufficieny or Aboriginal Economics.
Interesting stuff...I don't know much about it.

I think it would be a really great idea for the government to designate a large chunk of federal land to create model societies to test economic theories. You would have to get a big cross section of the population to participate, but it might be very beneficial to test a lot of these theories on a fairly large scale and see what happens. You could work in conjunction with research institutions to make sure everything was studied and analyzed. It would be like an economics version of Survivor.