Intellectuals like Marxism because Marx makes economics simple—the rich get their money from the poor. (How the rich manage this, since the poor by definition don’t have any money, is beyond me. But never mind.)
Real economics are more complicated than anything that intellectuals can make sense of.* Also, living in an ivory tower teaches few economic lessons—even fewer now that intellectuals have banned the ivory trade.
Marxism puts inarticulate notions of a sharing-caring nicer world into vivid propaganda slogans. Slogans such as: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”** Which may be the most ridiculous political-economic idea that anybody has ever had.
My need is for Beluga caviar, a case of Chateau Haut-Brion 1961, a duplex on 5th Avenue overlooking Central Park, a bespoke suit from Gieves & Hawkes in Savile Row, a matched pair of Purdey 12-bore sidelock shotguns, and a 1962 Ferrari 250 GTO that recently sold at Sotheby’s Monterey auction for $48.4 million.
My ability is . . . Um . . . I have an excellent memory for limericks . . .
There once was a man from Nantucket . . .
What kind of totalitarian mind-meld would be required to determine everyone’s abilities and needs? What kind of dictatorship body slam would be necessary to distribute the goods of the able to the wants of the needy? We know what kind. The kind that the U.S.S.R and Mao’s China did their best to create.
The Soviet Union and Maoist China are two more reasons that millennials love socialism. This is not because young people learned left-wing lessons from the Soviets and the Red Guards. It’s because they didn’t.
Kids don’t get it that communists are bad people. It was too long ago. The Berlin Wall fell in 1989. Deng Xiaoping began market reforms in China in 1978. I have two millennial daughters. The end of the Cold War and the beginning of China’s economic boom are, respectively, as distant in time from them as the Great Depression and the Coolidge administration are from me.
To millennials, hearing the U.S.S.R. and Mao’s China used as examples of how socialism can go very, very wrong is like me hearing about the Kellogg-Briand Pact and the Smoot-Hawley Tariff. I did hear about the Kellogg-Briand Pact and the Smoot-Hawley Tariff in American History class. And I was not listening as hard as I could. Taking a guess, I’d say one was an international breakfast cereal treaty and the other had to do with the price of smoots.
For young people today, the only communist societies they know anything about*** are that goofy outlier North Korea and Cuba, where the Marxist-Leninism comes with cheap rum, ’57 Chevys, and “Guantanamera” sing-alongs.
Or, I should say, these are the only communist societies young people know anything about, except one . . . The communist society in which all young people grow up.
“From each according to his ability, to each according to his need” is deeply stupid and completely impractical. And yet there’s a place where it works. This place is my house. And your house. And anywhere else there’s a family.
To each according to his need . . . What don’t kids need? My sixteen-year-old son needs Mom to drive to school with his lunch, his homework, and one sock. Never mind that she packed his lunch, did his homework, and washed his socks—one of which he left behind this morning along with his homework and his lunch so that she has to drive back to school even though she just returned from driving him to school.
From each according to Mom’s and Dad’s ability, not to mention the ability of Mom’s and Dad’s Visa card credit line and the bank loans we took out to pay for school tuition.
The grim truth is, kids are born communists.
* This is similar to the baseball/football conundrum. My late and much missed (and highly intellectual) friend Charles Krauthammer pointed it out. He said, “Do you know why intellectuals love baseball so much? Because football is too hard to understand.
** A common socialist catch phrase of the 1840s swiped by Karl Marx who felt—like Ayanna Pressley and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez felt about Michael Capuano and Joe Crowley—that the socialists weren’t socialistic enough.
*** Okay, there’s Venezuela. But, doing DIY opinion polling, I queried my three kids. My eldest replied by text: “OMG dad im studying 4 my art hist final ive got to memoize 35 german expressionists!!!” My middle child emailed, “Isn’t it something else Trump did bad.” And my youngest (who’s taking Spanish) said, “Zuelas for sale?”
Knowing Write from Left
Another reason kids are communists is that they’re taught to read.
Literature hates capitalism. This has nothing to do with literary elite types being fashionably lefty. Taking a guess from personal experience (albeit peripheral to anything that could be called literature), it has something to do with writers being morons about money.
Or not. Shakespeare seems to have been nobody’s fool in the matter of pounds, shillings, and pence. And Shakespeare was hating capitalism while capitalism was still being invented—before “capitalist” was even a word.
The Merchant of Venice centers on a nasty portrayal of Shylock, the only worthwhile person in the play.
All the other main characters are rich layabouts, except for the titular merchant, Antonio, and he’s an idiot. He’s going to loan his profligate friend Bassanio 3,000 ducats (something like half a million dollars) so that Bassanio can afford to date Portia.
Meanwhile Antonio’s business affairs are a mess. He’s cash poor because all his capital is tied up in high-risk ventures. He’s counting on huge returns from emerging market trading ventures.
Shylock, a keen-eyed financial analyst, sums up Antonio’s investment portfolio: “He hath an argosy bound to Tripolis, another to the Indies . . . a third at Mexico, a fourth for England.”
Libya, Southeast Asia, Mexico, and . . . England? What, exactly, is this merchant of Venice merchandizing? Looks to me like he’s trading in boat people, smuggled rhino horns,
