Gyroscopic Investing

MediumTex wrote: Even when it comes to health care reform, single payer is socialism, but forcing everyone to buy an insurance policy is pretty solidly capitalist, I would say.

craigr wrote: First I will admit that my blood boils when I see people quote Marx. His ideas resulted in the deaths of millions of people around the world, impoverishment of many more, and even today he is quoted in academia as a hero.  

For real.  To be an admirer of Marxist thought, one has to remain willfully blind about the unimaginable human suffering it has caused in practice.  Unfortunately, that urge to put on the Commissar's cap and move other people like pieces on a chessboard is too powerful for many idealists to resist.

doodle wrote: I proposed before the idea that we create a reading and discussion group based around some of the most important political economists that are frequently quoted but little read....Marxs Capital, Smiths Wealth of Nations,....we could throw in Von Mises, Keynes, Ricardo, Freidman...etc etc. the idea would be essentially an online book club of sorts where we could break the works into manageable chunks and debate and clarify them together chapter by chapter. If anyone is game, I would love to go through some of these works with the people here. I think the educational insights from this experience would rival that of any Ivy League school program. :-)

He also developed a (resultantly prescient)[26] critique of Marxism, predicting that if the Marxists were successful in seizing power, they would create a party dictatorship "all the more dangerous because it appears as a sham expression of the people's will."[27]
........Although Bakunin accepted Marx’s class analysis and economic theories regarding capitalism, acknowledging "Marx’s genius", he thought Marx was arrogant, and that his methods would compromise the social revolution. More importantly, Bakunin criticized "authoritarian socialism" (which he associated with Marxism) and the concept of dictatorship of the proletariat which he adamantly refused.
"If you took the most ardent revolutionary, vested him in absolute power, within a year he would be worse than the Tsar himself.[24]"

stone wrote:
I'm not so sure that our current finacialized, global system won't in hindsight be viewed as also causing pointless millions of deaths by starvation and dirty water etc. The price spike in grains in 2009 was our version of Mao's famines I guess. That speculative price spike in agricultural commodities caused a lot of starvation.

I am shocked though by hearing that in communist Bulgaria, they used to make factory workers work 8hrs on, 8hrs off, 8hrs on etc. They had to work at constantly rotating hours and were constantly sleep deprived. Apparently it was used as a way to crush all human spirit.

Simonjester wrote: i read Marx a long time ago, my memory of it is probably to rusty to debate the finer points, but i wasn't convinced by it even at a young and impressionable age...

having heard personal 1st hand story's since then about those that lived through it hasn't helped improve my opinion of the philosophy in any way either.

Engels, in the preface introduction to the 1883 German edition of the Manifesto, said that the Manifesto was "essentially Marx's work" and that "the basic thought... belongs solely and exclusively to Marx."[5]

The section ends by outlining a set of short-term demands:

  1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.
  2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
  3. Abolition of all right of inheritance.
  4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
  5. Centralisation of credit in the hands of the State, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.
  6. Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State.
  7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.
  8. Equal liability of all to labour. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
  9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country, by a more equitable distribution of the population over the country.
  10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children's factory labour in its present form and combination of education with industrial production.[14]

The implementation of these policies would, as believed by Marx and Engels, be a precursor to the stateless and classless society.[13] In a controversial passage they suggested that the "proletariat" might in competition with the bourgeoisie be compelled to organise as a class, form a revolution, make itself a ruling class, sweep away the old conditions of production, and in that step have abolished its own supremacy as a class.[13] This account of the transition from socialism to communism was criticised particularly during and after the Soviet era.