Off the Marx

Been away so long I hardly knew the place
Gee it's good to be back home
Leave it till tomorrow to unpack my case
Honey disconnect the phone
--The Beatles

Classic example of an argument that starts out with the wrong premise, thereby negating everything that follows. The author claims out of the gate that we are experiencing a 'once in a lifetime crisis of capitalism' without bothering to justify how our current system reflects capitalism.

Indeed, it is much easier to justify the opposite--that capitalism has been waning and that we are instead experiencing a crisis of socialism. Capitalism is private ownership and control of the means of production. At the oppositive end of the spectrum of economic organizing is socialism. Socialism is public (read: government) owership and control of the means of production.

The most straightforward means of justifying a claim of increasing socialism is simply to observe the gargantuan levels of trends of government spending. When governments spend, they take control of assets that were formerly privately owned. A purely capitalistic system would see only enough resources taken by government to support property rights. We passed that limit a long time ago.

Since the author cites Marx, it is also useful to examine Marx and Engel's 10 point plan for gradually overthrowing a capitalistic society. It is hard to argue that nearly every one of the items on the list have not been moving in the direction prescribed by Marx and Engels.

The author suggests that the world 'give Marx a chance' to save things. The world has been giving him a chance for at least the past 100 years. As Mises rightly observed, that chance has pushed the globe to the brink of chaos.