Pat Boone Calls The President A Marxist

[TheCurmudgeon]

The problem is that his socio-economic model doesn't do a very good job of describing reality. (Some, such as myself, would go so far as to refer to it as "economic illiteracy.") As evidence, I offer all the successful, prosperous countries operating along Marxist lines.

I think that you are showing your own lack of understanding. First, Marx was a brilliant economist FOR HIS TIME. He recognized a number of "truths" that others were having a hard time grasping. He was a horrible anthropologist. His classifications of societies based on their economic conditions was ahead of its time but he lacked the depth of knowledge needed to really apply them. "Ancient Societies", the first real book on what later would be classified as Hunter-Gather and Horticulturist societies was only published a few years before his death and he never finished his work attempting to apply his thoughts on economics to it. Therefore, his teleological thoughts on where society came from and where it was ultimately going were poorly informed at best, at worse they reflect his own personal "dislike" for the class system that had developed that he rightly saw as a drag on the potential for economic growth since it fostered the cronyism you accuse communist systems of. Certain things are part of human nature and can be found in almost any economic system, capitalist or communist.

At best, the attempts to implement Marxism as the organizing principle for any country has resulted in cronyism (commonly referred to by the oxymoron "crony capitalism"), massive bureaucracy, debt as a huge percentage of GDP (sometimes greater than GDP), and bizarre notions such as a tax cut is government "spending."

Right now all those capitalist countries, including the US, are crumbling under their own debt. And just to be clear, lending and borrowing are fundamental components of capitalist systems as well. One must separate the economics from the political system.

At worst, Marxism (and its close cousin, Socialism) leads to the Ukrainian Famine, the Holocaust, the Great Leap Forward, the Killing Fields, etc. with mortality rates that make the term "megadeaths" appropriate.

Marxism and Socialism are not closely related, although it is a fair argument that socialism, as a governmental system, is a hybrid of communism and capitalism, designed to implement the best of both worlds.

The truth that many people in the US don't want to believe is that America needs to become a socialist country. The "Virtue of Selfishness" attitude that has become the founding ideologies of groups like the TEA party leave no room for civic duties - it is all about me and leaving me to do what I want because that produces the best possible world (for me). The "war of all against all" as Hobbes would describe it. The major problem with the US is that it has no historical commonality - no common ethnic or religious group to maintain a semblance of social cohesion. We are not all French or Swedish or Kurd or Christians or Jews. In fact it prides itself on the individualist mentality. But if everyone is an individual, how do you work together for a common goal? You can't. All that remains is the slow decay as everyone tries to keep for themselves without any thought for the greater good.

If you don't believe that then look at the gun control debate. It is not enough that we have armed police to protect us. We cannot depend on the system. We don't trust it. So we must be able to defend ourselves from everyone else in the country. There is no cohesion in this train of thought. It is based on the idea that there is no unifying bond - nothing that we have in common. In the US, the only thing we have is the history of our common government. Remember that Hobbes was describing the world before the Social Contract. If we are going to have a social contract then the only entity we can do that with is the government. If it does not become the focal point of our unity - if it instead becomes the the center of our fears, then we have nothing else. We will slowly splinter. The US will go out with a whiny whimper.