New World Order, Inc.
Just yesterday, I read that the belief "that we could have utopian prosperity if we got rid of private businesses and had the government run everything" should be marked down to "stubborn stupidity." Fair enough. As hyperbolic and Straw Manned-up as that statement is, thwarting all independent economic activity would be a bit delusional, given
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Huh?
Face it, Marx was straight-up wrong. . . .
Ah, but here you prove my point. It turns out ol' Karl wasn't that far off the mark at all. Several of his observations in Das Kapital were right on the mark. Steven Keen calls him the last great classical economist (the first was Adam Smith).
Sadly, since he called for a revolution of classes he helped define, and since Russia wound up following that advice, there followed his writing and life a time of instability in the field of economics where folks bent over backward inventing theories-many of them based on absolute bullshit-that attempted to debunk Marx's contributions. It got so ugly that other economists (like Keynes) in return bent over backward to disguise any reference to Marx lest they get branded as "Marxist" even though that theory was absolutely proven correct.
The result?
The advantage Marxists have over economists is that at least they are upfront about having an ideology. Marxists are as consciously committed to the belief that capitalism should give way to socialism as economists are to the often unconscious belief that, if only we could rid ourselves of government intervention in the market, we would currently reside in the best of all possible worlds.
(Steve Keen, Debunking Economics: The Naked Emperor Dethroned?, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, p. 442.)
That just leaves the various flavors of capitalism to duke it out.
Again, proving my point. Keen's entire book points out that those various flavors are seriously flawed. He doesn't suggest alternatives, which means that we seriously have to examine our financial system (which is what capitalism ultimately distills to) and see how it can be improved before it crashes yet again.
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Communism and other forms of collectivism fail because Marx's labor-based theory of value is demonstrably false and has lead to nothing but murder mayhem and oppression everywhere it has taken root.
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Saying that Economics skews right, is a lot like saying that Chicano Lit skews towards the study of latino writers or that Womens Studies majors skew towards feminism.
No, wrong. Economics can be either right or left without not being economics. What's at stake here is which school of econ will be supported by society/monied interests. Those monied interests have the most to lose if the econ shifts left.
Communism and other forms of collectivism fail because Marx's labor-based theory of value is demonstrably false and has lead to nothing but murder mayhem and oppression everywhere it has taken root.
Marx wrote both economics observations and dialectic dualism in the Hegelian style. Only the latter "class tensions will inevitably lead to revolution" bullshit has anything to do with the murder and mayhem you mention. (I gave examples earlier, but again, screw LJ.)
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Sadly, there are plenty of historical right-wing, left-wing and middle-of-the-road jerks engaging in "nothing but murder mayhem and oppression."
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