Most of us are familiar with the story of Laissez-faire capitalism and the resulting abuses unleashed during Europe’s Industrial Revolution (1750 to 1850).  To correct these horrific insults to humanity, Karl Marx and his pal Friedrich Engels took it upon themselves to identify the problem and offer a solution…not realizing they would unleash a theoretical construct that would be used to murder, torture and  enslave most of humanity.   Their solution was Communism.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto in 1848.  Little did they know that these ideas (hatched in an arm chair in a library) would be used to enslave billions of people and responsible for hundreds of millions of agonizing deaths from starvation and cruelly at the hands of the masters it spawned.  The popular culture in today’s America cannot fathom this since they have not been educated to the evils contained in these well-intentioned ideals still proffered by our Progressive Democrats.

Unfortunately, Marx and most of our fellows today are caught up in labels and thus cannot discern the common elements in man’s inhumanity to man.  Bottom line is that if one man or group of men has unconstrained power over another, there will necessarily be abuse no matter what trendy label happens to suit your needs.

Mr. Marx believed that unconstrained capitalism was evil and it was and remains so today.  He described the class struggles between the haves and the have-nots (Bourgeois and Proletarians).  He also believed that the natural evolution dictates that democracy yields to socialism which in turn yields the final Utopian end state of Communism.  Democracy => Socialism => Communism. You can find this same theology in many of today’s progressives.

Mr. Marx also wrote another book called Das Kapital meant to expose the economic laws of capitalism and how it was the precursor to socialism.

If you’ve ever experienced the mental gymnastics and pain of reading Das Kapital you can appreciate the difficulty Mr. Marx had in explaining central planning of an economy and the socialist mode of production.  You should at least try to read a few chapters to get a sense of its morbid complexity.  What this book and Soviet Central Planning taught me is that central planning of an economy is a fool’s errand and that these decisions should be left in the hands of the individual whose work and toil created the value in the first place.  I think of it as a distribution of power model rather than a distribution of wealth model. When we remove the decision making from the individual who created the value, we create in its place malfeasance, abuse and inefficient allocation or resources not fair allocation as Marx would have us believe.  One example, I remember a friend going to a Russian shoe store to buy a pair of shoes only to find they had only left shoes…no right ones.  This would never happen in a free market, only by way of central control by a ridged, bloated bureaucracy.  Marx also missed the concept of individual motivation and how that impacts supply and demand.  Here again we can turn to our Soviet friends who had very cheap food prices as dictated by the authorities but when you went to the grocery store all the shelves were empty.

“From each according to his ability, to each according to his need (or needs)” is a slogan popularized by Karl Marx in his 1875 Critique of the Gotha Program.

In the Marxist view, such an arrangement will be made possible by the abundance of goods and services that a developed communist society will produce; the idea is that, with the full development of scientific socialism and unfettered productive forces, there will be enough to satisfy everyone’s needs. Sound familiar?

The old systems of Feudalism, Monarchies and the newer Laissez-faire capitalism were flawed and needed to be replaced with a well-thought out system to provide the most good for the most people.

Feudalism was a system for ordering society around relationships derived from the holding of land in exchange for service or labor. Monarchies were based on hereditary and unconstrained capitalism– while demonstrably more efficient– did not protect the masses from the abuse of the powerful.

The world has never known a communist government to date. The Soviet Union was not Communist. It was a centrally controlled government run by the powerful few corporate officers. China, North Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, Laos are the same. The cheat of Communism is that it seduces the masses into the belief that they will get something for nothing. Once the idea of communism takes hold in the minds of the masses, it has been used by the few to seduce the uneducated into slavery. Hugo Chavez’s takeover of Venezuela’s democracy is a recent case in point.

Were Karl Marx and Fredrick Engles evil doods? Nah. They were just a couple of well-intentioned do-gooders out to save the world.

So what’s better than communism?  A free market economy regulated by a government whose power over the individual is constrained by a constitution which places value on individual rights and freedoms.  As Ben Franklin said…”It’s a republic, if you can keep it.”