GET IN THE RING: Karl Marx v. Thomas Sowell
Economic Philosophers Duke it Out in the Battle of Their Quotes
Announcer:
In this corner, we have Karl Marx, an antisemitic son of a lawyer who was born Jewish in 1818.
By many reports, Karl Marx was an unkept Loser. Although he was the son of “privilege” who studied philosophy, earning a doctorate at the University of Jena, he was considered a lazy student. For his entire life, he didn’t support himself or his family, and lived off other people’s money. Three of his seven “legitimate” children died from poverty induced conditions Marx created. He convinced his benefactor, Frederick Engels, the son of a successful capitalist, to claim fatherhood of Marx’s child he conceived with the maid who lived in the house Marx shared with his wife and family. Years later, Marx treated his illegitimate child with contempt, but then again, he treated most people with contempt. Yes, the man who professed concern for worker’s rights had a maid and did not even pay her!
In this corner, we have Thomas Sowell, an American black man born into poverty in 1930 in the Jim Crow south. His future looked bleak, but a move with his family to New York City (NYC) as a young boy changed the direction of his life.
His brilliant mind absorbed everything, including the amazing NYC library, that opened his world. An admitted Marxist while in his teens and 20s, he persevered after a continuous struggle from the college of hard knocks. After time in the Marines, he studied nights at Howard University, later earning scholarships to Harvard and Columbia where he earned his undergraduate and master’s degrees, and eventually earned his doctorate in economics from the University of Chicago through hard work and perseverance. In complete contrast to Karl Marx, he supported himself and family and when his young son struggled to talk, Sowell’s ever-present perseverance and research skills helped him find solutions allowing his son to live a normal, thriving life from a disorder coined “Einstein syndrome.”
ROUND 1
ANNOUNCER: Thomas Sowell throws the first punch to the Right:
“Socialism is a wonderful idea. It is only as a reality that it has been disastrous. Among people of every race, color, and creed, all around the world, socialism has led to hunger in countries that used to have surplus food to export.... Nevertheless, for many of those who deal primarily in ideas, socialism remains an attractive idea -- in fact, seductive. Its every failure is explained away as due to the inadequacies of particular leaders.” Thomas Sowell
Another few lightening Rights by Sowell:
“Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it.” Thomas Sowell
“I have never understood why it is "greed" to want to keep the money you have earned but not greed to want to take somebody else's money.” Thomas Sowell
ANNOUNCER: Marx comes in for the kill with a sucker punch to the Left:
“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guildmaster and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, that each time ended, either in the revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.” Karl Marx
CROWD APPLAUSE
ANNOUNCER: Sowell overtakes Marx with another lightening Right.
“The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.” Thomas Sowell
“Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good.” Thomas Sowell
“Competition does a much more effective job than government at protecting consumers.” Thomas Sowell
ANNOUNCER: And another punch from Sowell’s right!
“If politicians stopped meddling with things they don't understand, there would be a more drastic reduction in the size of government than anyone in either party advocates.” Thomas Sowell
ROUND 2
ANNOUNCER: Marx comes in for the kill with a punch from the Left:
“The foundation of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is, indeed, the self-consciousness and self esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself, or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man – state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world... Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition flower. The criticism of religion disillusions man, so that he will think, act, and fashion his reality like a man who has discarded his illusions and regained his senses, so that he will move around himself as his own true Sun. Religion is only the illusory Sun which revolves around man as long as he does not revolve around himself.” Karl Marx
CROWD APPLAUSE
ANNOUNCER: Marx gets another punch on the Left:
“Contempt for theory, art, history, and for man as an end in himself, which is contained in an abstract form in the Jewish religion, is the real, conscious standpoint, the virtue of the man of money. The species-relation itself, the relation between man and woman, etc., becomes an object of trade! The woman is bought and sold.” Karl Marx
“In this moment, I am euphoric. Not because of any phony God's blessing. But because, I am enlightened by my own intelligence.” Karl Marx
“The last capitalist we hang shall be the one who sold us the rope.” Karl Marx
SILENCE from the Crowd
ANNOUNCER: Oh my! Sowell swings a Right and another Right!
“It is amazing that people who think we cannot afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, and medication somehow think that we can afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, medication and a government bureaucracy to administer it.” Thomas Sowell
“The fact that the market is not doing what we wish it would do is no reason to automatically assume that the government would do better.” Thomas Sowell
“Unfortunately, the real minimum wage is always zero, regardless of the laws, and that is the wage that many workers receive in the wake of the creation or escalation of a government-mandated minimum wage, because they lose their jobs or fail to find jobs when they enter the labor force. Making it illegal to pay less than a given amount does not make a worker’s productivity worth that amount—and, if it is not, that worker is unlikely to be employed.” Thomas Sowell
“The most basic question is not what is best, but who shall decide what is best.” Thomas Sowell
“The fact that so many successful politicians are such shameless liars is not only a reflection on them, it is also a reflection on us. When the people want the impossible, only liars can satisfy.” Thomas Sowell
ROUND 3
ANNOUNCER: Marx gets the first few jabs in:
“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language.” Karl Marx
“Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as Communistic by its opponents in power? Where the opposition that has not hurled back the branding reproach of Communism, against the more advanced opposition parties, as well as against its reactionary adversaries? Two things result from this fact. I. Communism is already acknowledged by all European powers to be in itself a power. II. It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the Specter of Communism with a Manifesto of the party itself.” Karl Marx
“In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly—only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!” Karl Marx
“The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his 'natural superiors,' and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self interest, callous 'cash payment.' It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom—Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation. The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage laborers. The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.” Karl Marx
ANNOUNCER: Thomas Sowell sneaks another jab from the Right.
“Despite a voluminous and often fervent literature on "income distribution," the cold fact is that most income is not distributed: It is earned.” Thomas Sowell
“The economic disasters of socialism and communism come from assuming a blanket superiority of those who want to run a whole economy.” Thomas Sowell
ANNOUNCER: KARL MARX IS BARELY HANGING ON:
“The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas.” Karl Marx
“Education is free. Freedom of education shall be enjoyed under the condition fixed by law and under the supreme control of the state” Karl Marx
ANNOUNCER: THE CROWD IS FALLING ASLEEP? Thomas Sowell throws another punch to the Right:
“The problem isn't that Johnny can't read. The problem isn't even that Johnny can't think. The problem is that Johnny doesn't know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling.” Thomas Sowell
“When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear.” Thomas Sowell
“People who pride themselves on their "complexity" and deride others for being "simplistic" should realize that the truth is often not very complicated. What gets complex is evading the truth.” Thomas Sowell
“The offspring of privilege have dominated the leadership of Marxist movements from the days of Marx and Engels through Lenin, Mao, Castro, Ho Chi Minh, and their lesser counterparts around the world and down through history. The sheer reiteration of the "working class" theme in Marxism has drowned out this plain fact.” Thomas Sowell
ANNOUNCER: It’s over! Karl Marx is down, down, down. 1, 2, 3. Thomas Sowell is the Winner!
Oh sure Sowell can beat the crap out of Karl, but what about Groucho? He was the Marx with the best quotes:
Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others.
The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you've got it made.
Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.
I could go on.
Pretty good essay...BUT...yes, there is always a but. I think that Marx against a contemporary of his period would have been better. Someone who never was a Marxist in the first place. I have highlighted his work in https://www.courageouslion.us/p/the-law-2024 That man wrote his pamphlet in 1850 while Marx wrote his in 1848. I suspect that Frederic Bastiat may have possibly read Marx and possibly it was that influence that drove him to write "The Law".