Karl Marx

"The Communist Party celebrates the birthday of Karl Marx; to close out its party congress, held twice a decade, the military band plays the “Internationale” socialist anthem inside the Great Hall of the People. But as I said in my introduction, China is also a country governed by conservatives who masquerade as leftists. Perhaps no other self-proclaimed socialist country is as lightly taxed as China. Nearly three-quarters of China’s population are [spared from paying income tax](private://read/01k3jwt46q240aq6fe12mqkyr0/16_Notes.xhtml#_idTextAnchor314). China has also failed to levy a broad property tax, leaving the bulk of rich city dwellers’ wealth untouched. It relies more heavily on consumption taxes, which are regressive because they burden the poor more than the rich."

"As Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels saw clearly, the 19th-century business class created more massive and more colossal productive forces than all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground—what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labor? Each generation’s inventors and visionaries surpassed their predecessors. In 1843, the London public was invited to make its first crossing underneath the River Thames by a newly dug tunnel. In 1869, the Suez Canal saved Eurasian shipping traffic from rounding the Cape of Good Hope. In 1914 the Panama Canal cut short the route from Atlantic to Pacific. Even the Great Depression failed to impede relentless progress in the United States, which has always been home to the world’s most far-seeing definite optimists."