OBAMA’S OPIATE

Last week (12/04), Mr. Obama confirmed the suspicion of many that he is indeed a Marxist by giving a speech claiming that "income inequality" is, according to him, "the defining challenge of our time."

Yesterday (12/10), the Drudge Report headlined a speech given by David Simon, producer of the HBO show, The Wire, entitled "My Country Is A Horror Show."   Marx was right about capitalism, according to Simon, which is why capitalist America is heartless and cruel and doesn’t care about the poor.

Thus I was involved in a revealing exchange yesterday. Something I had tweeted about this prompted a series of responses along the lines of "Typical: like all capitalists, you don’t like poor people."

I couldn’t help tweeting back: "I love all these ‘capitalists don’t like poor people’ tweets. It’s true: we want to turn them into rich people. It’s socialists who need their client groups."

The Lefties on Twitter promptly lined up to argue that capitalism couldn’t survive without poverty, that its essence was the widening of inequality, that it concentrated more and more power in the hands of fewer and fewer plutocrats, that its days were numbered.  One might stand for many: "In fact capitalism (by definition) needs more poor people and prefers poor bargaining rights and gross inequality."

What’s fascinating here is not just that the Leftie tweeters are wrong; it’s that, like Mr. Obama and Mr. Simon, their premises are lifted directly from Karl Marx.

Marxism, uniquely among political philosophies, defined itself as a science. To its adherents, its propositions were not speculative but empirical. As a good Hegelian, Marx saw his forecasts as part of an inexorable historical process. Yet every one – every one – of them turned out to be false.

Capitalism was supposed to destroy the middle class, leaving a tiny clique of oligarchs ruling over a vast proletariat. In fact, capitalism has enlarged the bourgeoisie wherever it has been practiced. Capitalism was supposed to lower living standards for the majority. In fact, the world is wealthier than would have been conceivable 150 years ago.

The whole market system was supposed to be on its last legs when Marx and Engels were writing 150 years ago. In fact, it was entering a golden age, hugely benefiting the poorest. As Schumpeter put it, the princess was always able to wear silk stockings, but it took capitalism to put them within reach of the shop girl.

I don’t know how many of the people parroting Marx are aware that they’re doing so. But, whatever name we call it by, his doctrine has proved stunningly impervious to events. You’d have thought – I did think – that the collapse of the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact colonies in 1989 would have definitively refuted revolutionary socialism. Yet successive generations continue to fall for it.

The more I read of behavioral psychology, the more I think that ideologies are as much a product of people’s nature as of observed experience. The perverted doctrines that actuated the Bolsheviks may be immanent in a portion of humanity.

Some people are determined to see every success as a swindling of someone else, every transaction as an exploitation, every exercise in freedom as a violation of some ideal plan, every tradition as a superstition. How delicious that, as we approach the bicentenary of his birth in 1818, Karl Marx should have turned into the thing he loathed above all: the prophet of an irrational faith.

Marxism remains the opiate of the leftist masses, among whom evidently are wealthy television producers, and the current president of the United States.

Daniel Hannan is a Member of the European Parliament, representing South East England for the Conservative Party.