October 23, 2011

How to (Almost) Sympathize with Occupy Wall Street

By Bernie Reeves
Has Marx's long-awaited economic determinism actually arrived?  Long ago, in the time of the Bolshevik Revolution, the Comintern and Soviet "active measures" assured their followers that capitalism would fail in the West.  After all this time, are the jargon and propaganda of the old left actually coming true?  Say it ain't so.  After all, history's supreme socialist regime in Russia collapsed in 1991.  And we won, right?  Free-market capitalism triumphed, and communism failed.  End of conversation. That is, until 2008.  The hardy middle class of America had survived the incessant cycles of feast and famine since the founding of the Republic.  After each crash, stability returned and business went on -- until the next collapse.  The Great Depression was an historic low.  The oil crisis, inflation, and stratospheric interest rates of the 1970s constituted the next really big blow, followed by the ups and downs of the early '80s,...(Read Full Article)