"Owners of capital will stimulate the working class to buy more and more of expensive goods, houses and technology, pushing them to take more and more expensive credits, until their debt becomes unbearable.
The unpaid debt will lead to bankruptcy of banks, which will have to be nationalised and the State will have to take the road which will eventually lead to Communism."
Karl Marx - Das Kapital 1867
Perhaps ol’ Karl was right about something? I expect that at least five people in this thread will call me a “kook” or “crackpot”. However, there are several things that don’t add up. People are quick to blame it on “stupid government” or incompetence. But, isn’t that the cop-out?
It’s so much easier to place the blame on human stupidity.
He might have been right about it if he actually said it.
By the way it has nothing to do with competence, there were plenty of people in the government who were very capable. It’s just a question of what they’re capable of.
That quote has been gaining a lot of circulation but I smell a rat. It doesn’t sound like Marx. I’m no expert but while there was easy credit at times in the past, to the best of my knowledge the idea of the proletariat getting expensive houses would never have occured to Marx. Someone correct me if I’m wrong on this but Megan McArdle said the same thing. I don’t have time to read Das Kapital to check if this is in there but I so doubt it.
You have to put this in context with the rest of the text…
“… until at last a half-black half-Arab ubermensch will rise from the ashes of the petite bourgeois law academy, spend a few years in the Senate, and deliver the proletariat from their bondage with the wave of his hand and the signing of bills which he doth not even read. And the working classes – with shovels in hand – will rejoice and the trumpets they will sound! They will widen the interstates (which are like ones for horses, but without any horse accidents) and build a tower of babel straight to Dialectical Materialist Heaven.”
…simultaneously with, a FNMA/FHA intent on implementing a single point of failure national experiment dedicated to the theory that what has kept poor people poor is, lack of access to credit.
So, we are treated to the spectacle of bank executives, the latest beggars at the public trough, being hauled in front of COngress and accused of a] not lending and b] handing out too many credit cards.
???
Congress/The American People want, at the same time, a] the banking industry to be safe, secure, and solvent and b] credit to flow like water again, to anybody who so much as asks. After all, Congress has folks complaining to them, so there must be a problem.
The pols want to, at the very same moment, claim that a] capitalism and free markets did it, but b] they need to deftly lure private investment back tot he economies, so that all this pump priming isn’t met with a resounding ‘thud.’
It’s never been so clear that the wheels are about to fall off this constructivist, gladhanding cronyfest, aftwer listening to those morons spout their irrational gibberish. I especially loved the exasperated response by one CEO, “I have no idea what you are talking about.”
The only way those hearings could have been any better was if one of the CEOs had finally said, 'The heck with TARP, I’m a taxpayer, too, and if you folks are the best we got to ‘RUN THE COUNTRY’, then I want my taxmoney back, you are all morons."