A core flaw in Marxist economic theory is its failure to see an economy as a dynamic system. It treats wealth as a fixed "pie" to be re-sliced, ignoring that the "oppressive" productive class it seeks to eliminate is what bakes the pie in the first place.
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The primary driver of wealth inequality isn't income, but asset ownership. Government money printing to cover deficit spending inflates asset prices. This forces those who understand finance to buy assets, which then appreciate, widening the gap between them and those who don't own assets.
Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto demands a state monopoly on money and credit. Since all modern economies use central banks to control the money supply, they are built on a Marxist principle. With money being half of every transaction, these economies are at best 50% capitalist and 50% Marxist.
Pre-modern societies, including the U.S. founders, based legal and social structures on "natural law"—an understanding of inherent human nature. The modern left's rejection of this concept leads to policies that ignore reality, such as denying innate human tendencies like greed, which ultimately fail.
The idea that a billionaire can "spend" their net worth is flawed. Their wealth is primarily in company stock; liquidating it would crash the price and signal a lack of confidence. This misunderstanding of wealth versus income fuels unrealistic proposals for solving global problems.
When government policy protects wealthy individuals and their investments from the consequences of bad decisions, it eliminates the market's self-correcting mechanism. This prevents downward mobility, stagnates the class structure, and creates a sick, caste-like economy that never truly corrects.
The rise of a precarious gig workforce of over 200 million people directly contradicts the Communist Party's founding promise of a "dictatorship of the proletariat." This growing underclass, living with minimal security and rights, represents a societal shift towards a capitalist-style structure that the party was originally formed to overthrow, creating a deep ideological crisis.
Sir Ronald Cohen suggests that economic systems like communism fail because they suppress the natural human instinct to strive. The goal should not be to eliminate capitalism's encouragement of striving, but to evolve it by redirecting that powerful drive toward achieving both financial profit and positive societal impact.
Profit from coercion, like government confiscation via taxation or inflation, harms total productivity in two ways. First, the coercer spends time on non-productive confiscation instead of creation. Second, the victim, having had their labor's fruits stolen, has a reduced incentive to produce in the future.
As governments print money, asset values rise while wages stagnate, dramatically increasing wealth inequality. This economic divergence is the primary source of the bitterness, anxiety, and societal infighting that manifests as extreme political polarization. The problem is economic at its core.
Instead of attacking wealth, a more effective progressive strategy is to champion aggressive, 'hardcore' capitalism while implementing high, Reagan-era tax rates on the resulting gains. This framework uses the engine of capitalism to generate wealth, which is then taxed heavily to fund public investments in infrastructure and education, creating a virtuous cycle.
