Friday, May 11, 2018

Tyler Cowen: "Marx is the one theorist who has not yet been refuted."



I really hope there is an excuse for this, any kind of excuse---even just a very tight deadline excuse.

Tyler Cowen writes in his Bloomberg column:
But when it comes to China, Marx is the one theorist who has not yet been refuted. It’s the Western liberals and the Maoists who both have egg on their faces.
The above quote comes from a convoluted Cowen essay for sure and it can be said that Cowen really meant this or that but I'll take Richard Ebeling's analysis any day:
Marx was a cruel, manipulative, vengeful individual with few if any
personal redeeming qualities. This included being racist and anti-Semitic in his views, both in print and in his correspondence.

He foisted on to the world an illusionary conception of human relationships as being defined by and built upon a “class conflict” between “capitalists” and “workers.” And using a pseudo-scientific theory of the “laws of history,” created a mythology of the “inevitability” of socialism and communism over capitalism.

He formulated a call for a “dictatorship of the proletariat” that became the template for tyranny and terror in every country that experienced a successful Marxist revolution. He hailed the establishment of socialist central planning, which brought economic disaster and despair for hundreds of millions forced to live in a “workers’ paradise.”

The end product was an ideology of paranoia, in which dictatorship was rationalized by the assertion that anti-socialist “class enemies” were everywhere, which justified a secret police, mass murder, comprehensive censorship, and thought control to preserve and expand the collectivist state of today and tomorrow.

Yes, let’s mark Marx’s birth, but as a lesson in the consequences of mad and mistaken ideas that brings down disaster on humanity.
-Robert Wenzel 



9 comments:

  1. --- Tyler Cowen: But when it comes to China, Marx is the one theorist who has not yet been refuted. ---

    "When it comes to China", Marx was not only refuted but discarded like a dirty pair of tighty whitees. Mao and the Maoists were the direct result of Marx's wrongheaded notions about history and economics.

    Marx was refuted 130 years ago, Mr. Cowen, by Bohm-Bawerk. He was refuted 90 years ago by Mises and 70 years ago by Hayek. He was refuted in 1989 with the spectacular failure of the Soviet block. He was refuted by the sad fate of millions upon millions of victims, murdered or starved or enslaved in his name.

    He was refuted. You're merely grasping at straws not to look the fool that you are.

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    1. If you think that the Soviet Union, or current China, are good examples (that is to say, accurate or intended implementations) of Marxism, you're stupider than the usual bollocks that flows from your finger tips portrays.

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    2. LOL. Isn't that always the excuse. The difference is that bad examples of Capitalism may have problems but bad examples of Marxism are so terrible, you'd have to be either a complete psychopath or fool to think it is a good thing.

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    3. Re: Phillip Martin,

      --- If you think that the Soviet Union, or current China, are good examples (that is to say, accurate or intended implementations) of Marxism ---

      Your retort would have more weight if you made a token effort to correctly address my argument. I didn't say that today's China is an implementation of Marxianism. Mao's China, on the other hand, was. So was the Soviet Union

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  2. Matthew Yglesias used to refer to Cowen as a "thoughtful mainstream libertarian".

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  3. Or the book Gulag Archipelago

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  4. I think Marx is solidly in the infamous 5 for the pain he has inflicted on humanity with his twisted mindset. Tight up there with Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini

    If I knew where he was buried I would find a way to get there and spit on his grave.

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    Replies
    1. Surely Marx was a bad dude and a worse economist, but I’m not sure if it’s quite fair to put him on par with actual mass murderers. It seems likely that, had Marx never written, they would have invoked the scribbles of some other petty little sophist to attempt to justify their crimes.

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