Quote of the day—Karl Marx

The rich will do anything for the poor but get off their backs.

Karl Marx
[In this age with both state and Federal government collapsing from the weight of “entitlements” I find the irony of this funny in a very sad, sick sort of way.—Joe]

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3 thoughts on “Quote of the day—Karl Marx

  1. The thing is, Marx would probably laugh at calling most of the welfare recipients poor in the USA today. Keep in mind that, at the time he wrote this, poor people were making less than subsistence wages and working over 80 hours per week. The poor were often crammed into 10+ people into a couple of rooms or were share croppers who were never able to quite make enough to ever get caught up. When you compare that with most of the modern poor who live with 4-5 people in apartments double the size of the ones back then. The modern poor get paid overtime if they work at one job more than 40 hours. The modern poor have the ability to send their children to school and improve their lives much more easily than the poor of his time period. Marx would not call those people poor.

  2. “The thing is, Marx would probably laugh at calling most of the welfare recipients poor in the USA today.”

    There was something about this statement that I thought wasn’t quite right, and now I understand what it is: He’d probably laugh, but he’d still be expecting Revolution. Karl Marx is the type who wouldn’t care whether or not an individual is “poor”. He’s much more concerned that someone, somewhere, might have a tiny bit more than someone else!

    It doesn’t matter that the poor of today are richer than many kings of his day: we have Bill Gates who has billions of dollars, which should be shared with those “poor” who have a car, a television, several game systems, and suffers from the obesity epidemic.

    Karl Marx was blinded by a desire to shape society as he saw fit. If a family chose to cram ten people into a two-bedroom house, and worked 80+ hours a week to pay for it, it would irk Marx, because they are “poor”; it would especially irk Marx if the said family was enjoying life: how could they, when there are people richer than them?!?

    If you can get out of the debt mindset that has beset Americans, and work to the point that you own your own house, you can make surprisingly little, and still provide for your family and save for the future. You can even become a “millionaire”, though it would take decades, and a touch of sacrifice (called “living within your means”) to do it. And it’s not all that difficult to do, once you decide to do it!

    It is this self-control that Marx opposes. He would never be satisfied until he gets his “Dictatorship of the Proletariat”–which, when all is said and done, is just “Dictatorship of the Elite Telling the Poor Peasants How to Live Their Lives”.

  3. Alpheus, “Dictatorship of the Elite Telling the Poor Peasants How to Live Their Lives”, while somewhat long for a bumpersticker, is in fact how the rich in today’s society are still on the backs of the poor. The entitlement programs are the most burdensome of charities if compared to the private charities. If a recipient of modern welfare “lived within his means” and had any surplus at the end of the year, or even used that surplus to learn a trade, he would be thrown off welfare as soon as it became known to his masters.
    And we say there are no slaves today!

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