At 02:27 PM 6/16/00 GMT, zeb haradon wrote:
>The root of Marxism is envy. Someone will always have more then someone
else, in some way, someone will always be jealous, and assert that the
reason someone has more then he is that the other person is cheating and
exploitative. There will be billionaire communists whining about the
tyranny of trillionaire communists.
As much as I loathe Marxism, I disagree with the above. I know quite a few
leftists, who occasionally associate themselves with Marxism. They often
refer to wealthy businessmen as exploitative, but rarely doctors, athletes,
or entertainers. An example of what I see: They ponder the fact that so
many pharmaceutical CEOs have been vastly richer than Jonas Salk, and the
reach the intuitive conclusion that this is vastly unfair. My conclusion
is that they're just ignorant of how a market works, and therefore cannot
understand the real value produced by a banker, venture capitalist, etc.,
or why it might be much greater than the value produced by a doctor or
factory worker. When it's Salk or John Lennon, by contrast, they can
perceive the value he produced, without any study of economics. This, BTW,
would explain why Lennon was rarely accused of hypocrisy, though basically
a filthy rich Marxist. Most supporters of Marxism aren't envious. They're
more like economically stupid libertarians, who fail to identify production
in most of the places it exists, and then conclude that it must really be
parasitism.
---------------------------------------------------
Ellis Wyatt
http://www.foothill.net/~wyattoil
---------------------------------------------------
We tend to scoff at the beliefs of the ancients.
But we can't scoff at them personally, to their
faces, and this is what annoys me.
--Deep Thoughts, with Jack Handey--
---------------------------------------------------
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Jul 27 2000 - 14:13:23 MDT