Pat Boone Calls The President A Marxist

[TheCurmudgeon]

Last night there was a discussion on the BBC's Newsnight programme on the Cyprus banking raid and an economist pointed out to one discussant that the US government is a very, very active participant in the economy. Reference was made to the US$31 billion annual investment in drug / medical research, by an agency I didn't catch the name of. Needless to say in the UK and suspect other places in the EU, there is no equivalent, let alone such an amount.

Sometimes one hears Americans, inside and outside government, refer to the USA being a capitalist economy, free market etc. Really?

The sad (my) truth is that both the advocates and participants in public policy making in the developed 'West', whether capitalist or socialist and those in-between - just love spending other people's money.

Perhaps the USA should acknowledge it is not the current President who is a 'Marxist', but a rather large part of your establishment, elite, public and private sector.

We practice Corporate Marxism

J. W. - I can agree that we can agree to disagree

[Firn]

Marx did a brilliant job at looking and exposing some very nasty business practices of his day.

He very aptly described the vast economic development, the booming globalisation and the shifts of economic and political power:

The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie. The East-Indian and Chinese markets, the colonisation of America, trade with the colonies, the increase in the means of exchange and in commodities generally, gave to commerce, to navigation, to industry, an impulse never before known, and thereby, to the revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society, a rapid development.

The feudal system of industry, in which industrial production was monopolised by closed guilds, now no longer sufficed for the growing wants of the new markets. The manufacturing system took its place. The guild-masters were pushed on one side by the manufacturing middle class; division of labour between the different corporate guilds vanished in the face of division of labour in each single workshop.

Meantime the markets kept ever growing, the demand ever rising. Even manufacturer no longer sufficed. Thereupon, steam and machinery revolutionised industrial production. The place of manufacture was taken by the giant, Modern Industry; the place of the industrial middle class by industrial millionaires, the leaders of the whole industrial armies, the modern bourgeois.

Modern industry has established the world market, for which the discovery of America paved the way. This market has given an immense development to commerce, to navigation, to communication by land. This development has, in its turn, reacted on the extension of industry; and in proportion as industry, commerce, navigation, railways extended, in the same proportion the bourgeoisie developed, increased its capital, and pushed into the background every class handed down from the Middle Ages.

He sadly draw idiotic conclusions, was stupidly deterministic and pretty much deadly wrong on the macro side of economics. Of course he had not the advantage of our knowledge, and we have seen many getting it terrible wrong today despite that wealth of wisdom. Everybody who has studied the results of too much purity of cultic groupthink wielding the power of the state should be very aware. Maos great leap is just a horrific example of it.

Moderates were able to blunt the impact of naked capitalism, laying the foundations of sustained strong economic growth which rests on shoulders of many share- and stakeholders and did overall greatly lessen the chances of radicals left and right. Obama is arguably not moderate enough on some issues like government spending and financial reforms, doing too little but of course while facing strong headwinds.