Only for a short while did the collapse of the Soviet Union silence Marxism. The fatal attraction of the thoughts of Karl Marx has returned — not because they are right but because they are wrong. Marxism serves to convert resentment into a social problem. Marxism is attractive because this ideology offers a huge arsenal of bile to fire up personal ire and to transform wrath into a political agenda.
[Advocates for tariffs and trade controls often claim that tariffs are good “for everyone” because they ultimately lead to more production and wealth creation for everyone in the economy. In Chapter 2 of Theory and History, Ludwig von Mises notes that interventionist policies designed to benefit a certain interest group (e.g., tariffs) fail to obtain the goals claimed, and thus are not good “for everyone” after all. -Ed.]
Democratic governments, almost all of them, are normally run by career pols. They have ravenous appetites for wealth. They almost always have big plans to expand the government, which means they always want more money. (I remember Hillary Clinton’s recent book, What Happened. Here she spoke about her plans for a presidency and said she likes “to think big”.) Most popular governments, faced with money problems, will usually pretend they’re only after the wealth of the rich, but it is the great middle class that is bloodied.
Why?
Elections are just around the corner in Bavaria, Germany’s largest and economically strongest state. On October 14, Bavarians will go to the polls to elect a new state government. One thing that is already sure is that the Left Party, Germany’s mainstream socialist party, will not have much success.
Europe is today in the midst of a debate on the future of the European Union. It is not the first one: back before the Maastricht Treaty was passed in 1992, political leaders were discussing as well about where the EU, or as it was called back then, the European Community, was heading. Should it go the way of the “ever closer union,” or revert back to the fundamental principles? There was a split going through Europe on questions like this.
Somehow, an all-star Hollywood cast created The Company Men (2010) and it got past the usual censors. The movie is an effective rebuttal to Arthur Miller’s 1949 Death of a Salesman. The recently-laid-off characters spend the movie living their lives after rounds of layoffs. In doing so, they effectively act out a debate between a proponent of communism — Karl Marx, and a proponent of the free market — Carl Menger.
Earlier this week Aaron Ross Sorkin wrote an interesting article at the New York Times where he draws the connection between many of the political trends in this country—Trump and attacks on trade, rise of democratic socialist politicians, and the rise of general skepticism of the “expert class”—to the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis.
We are constantly bombarded with bad news. There are disasters, dangers, challenges, and woes. On the political scene, we find perpetual discord peppered with lurid denunciations and shrill condemnations. Media reports are alternately dismaying, disappointing, distressing, disgusting, or depressing. But despair not, friends: All is not lost!
Here let me serve you a heaping helping of good news: The world is more prosperous and more peaceful than it has ever been before.
