Monday, September 26, 2011

Letter to Bloomber Financial News in regard to their Marxism Revivalism articles....

It goes way too far calling Karl Marx a “social scientist.” Considering the longer term results of his theories is seems more like Science Fiction than science of any kind. It is more in line with L. Ron Hubbard style fiction in my opinion. We have had enough socialist revolutions now to discredit the idea nothing more than a popular excuse for imperial even roman style rule. The less marxista country is the more likely there is nominal equality. I can’t think of a communist country or a socialist country that does not have a class system. Marx was a “journalist” and idealist not a scientist. Russia went though the communist revolution and now is long past it but there is no evidence of a popularization of the land nor the means of production. You have better equality of ownership of property and the means of production in any American suburban sprawl area. The influence of Marx is indisputable but it has not been an experience that has left things better for the people that experienced it with the exception of the ruling classes or ruling family. The record is one of the most destructive there is in history. Count as many as 200 plus million people killed , countless failed economies with lingering poverty afterwards, If that is the well meaning social directive of Marxism where we ultimately look at the results to judge the intent the intentions were bad, very bad. Incentive based economies work far better than any command and control model with central planning. You can blame the housing crash on too little Marxism if you want to but then what was the point of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as public private partnerships for the common goal of making home ownership ubiquitous? Sure those agencies got spun off as quasi private entities and big profits were made initially investing in them. Even Warren Buffet got his share of profits being an early investor. Blaming market mechanism on these government insured investment agencies is like saying that the raw capitalism we see in China today is an out growth of absolute Maoist Marxism. It is silly. Marx discovered nothing and he predicted nothing at least nothing that had any scientific value, nor much of any social value. Getting rid of the Czar in Russia did not actually work to remove the Kremlin from every day life-It just got re-occupied. Some people were better off, some people ended up dead, others ended up in prison camps, unnecessary mass starvation happened on several occasions, life expectancy fell verses the west, wages were at depression levels, Too many basic products were so scarce that black and grey markets were the only thing that made the economy work. Public Planning was a fiasco unless you want to live in an old soviet workers flat? They still exist if you want to live that way. Public housing in the USA did not fare much better most of it did not last very long and if it did it destroyed the parts of the cities where it was located as “contaminated areas”. Russian communist pensions evaporated leaving pensioners completely destitute in many cases and that is a worry when it comes to dependence on social security in the USA. A promise is nice but it can only be guaranteed by marxism. Coerced altruism is another way to say Serfdom when the proposed promised benefits run out. Some workers will work 1/10 of their life time or more to make government happy and rich free spending dreamland for politicians and their supporters in public service jobs while it lasts. The government has no means of generating income in the future with the way it spends social security funds. There is no trust fund outside of the general fund. The program relies on inter-generational transfer of wealth mostly on a dollars per hour work basis. The sovereign wealth fund of the USA is the ability to tax labor into the future to pay for present day retirees. If the economy or the percentage of taxes required from paying in workers goes up to a level that is too painful there is going to be a reaction against it. At the point that Marxist forced altruism costs more than any potential gains from labor and from personal incentives involved there is pending failure of the program on the horizon. There is unlimited scarcity of labor when you have maximum incentives but when real Marxism comes into play there is negative incentive to bother going to work at all. You go to one of these basket case economies and the workers will tell you “everything belongs to everyone and no one and I don’t give a damn about working any harder than necessary not to be arrested.”