Luke 12:48
“From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked.”
Karl Marx
“From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”
Discuss.
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Karl Marx didn’t understand human psychology at all. His assumption was that people are basically honest and only desire basic survival. What he didn’t understand was the fact that people will always present their needs as being far greater than they actually are. Nobody needs a $120,000 Mercedes Benz, but a lot of folks would like to have one. This is easily seen in the people who are able to make $200,000 – $400,000 – $1 Million every year, but somehow always manage to be $2 Million in debt.
I was always fascinated by this phenomenon. I grew up with this kid who later became a real dot-com millionaire. He bought a rather overly large house in Los Altos Hills, got married to a Jewish American Princess type who liked cocaine and “having it all”, including the upper 6-figure priced Mercedes. 15 years later, he was divorced with two kids, a house that he’d stack-mortgaged into being so underwater that it will never be as valuable as the level of debt leveraged against it and that he wasn’t even allowed to live in. He still makes incredibly good money. He just doesn’t get to use any of it on himself. Every penny goes right out the door. The Mortgage on his own house in Palo Alto, the car payments on his, his ex-wifes and his kids cars, the loans he signed for to send his boys to University, not to mention all the bullshit credit card debt he’s taken on for stupid shit like $3000 suits and those $700 restaurant bills.
He complained the last time I saw him, about 6 years ago, that he “lives like a pauper” with his own 6-series BMW and his little 3200 sq ft craftsman house in downtown Palo Alto. He takes home an upper 6 figure salary, and still fucking complains about everything.
Karl Marx was a total Pollyanna when it comes to human behavior.
There is a real contrast here.
Karl Marx was a rationalist, observing the reality of human behavior while struggling with defining a system that might make that behavior work.
Luke, in contrast, believed he could get the truth from neither My word, the Torah, nor from observations but from the delusions of Paul.
So nobody paid Luke much attention until the Roman government gave state authority to priests and bishops who claimed to know what Paul was thinking.
By then Paul had been decapitated and recast into heroic legend.
Marx, based in my reality, remains a teacher.
Deathfrog
Marx was never a psychologist.
Seems like Freud would be amore useful trope here.
Does this make Michelle Bachmann a commie?
@1 You humans are stupid. Most of you, anyway. I have no debt. My burrow is paid for. My stock portfolio is my main asset, but I also own a business. I have plenty of income, but I don’t work, commute, or put up with employer BS. I sleep until noon and take afternoon naps. I eat and grow fat. Life is good. Ahhhh …
Meanwhile, what do you stupid humans do? You work at jobs you hate to make money you don’t need to buy things you don’t want to impress people you don’t like. Dummies …
A house may be large or small; as long as the neighboring houses are likewise small, it satisfies all social requirement for a residence. But let there arise next to the little house a palace, and the little house shrinks to a hut. The little house now makes it clear that its inmate has no social position at all to maintain.
Marx, Wage Labour and Capital (1847)
SJ… So we need one damn jew to shrink another?
But I’d have to agree with deathfrog… Marx did not understand the monkey called man.
Roger Rabbit spews:
Does this make Michelle Bachmann a commie?
No, she’s still a cunt…
Dr. Hilarius spews:
A house may be large or small; as long as the neighboring houses are likewise small, it satisfies all social requirement for a residence. But let there arise next to the little house a palace, and the little house shrinks to a hut. The little house now makes it clear that its inmate has no social position at all to maintain.
Marx, Wage Labour and Capital (1847)
Marx was superseded by Sam Colt, who made all men equal. If you shoot the rich man you no longer have a social position problem.
Sam Colt did not make all men equal, because men are unequal on the draw.
That’s why the good doctor shoots rich men in the back, I’m no fast draw.
Looks like the ex-dictator of the Ukraine had been busy looting his country.
http://abcnews.go.com/Internat.....g-22640756
Roger Rabbit Commentary: Don’t they all?
The brand X blog is almost dead. Only 2 posts since December.
@6, @10 That actually works the other way as well. Back in the 1970’s after one of our earlier upheavals in the Seattle Police Department, a new chief was hired from another part of the country who rather impulsively bought a $75,000 house (and that was a LOT of house then) in an $8,000 neighborhood. After he realized his mistake and neither the seller, the broker nor the bank was willing to let him out of the deal, his subsequent performance on the job seemed to reflect a commitment to wreak vengeance on a city that he felt had wronged him. Either that, or he was just an incompetent jerk. Maybe both.
And in this morning’s Fairview Fishwrap, there’s a story about a big, fancy house on five wooded acres on Mercer Island whose owners have reluctantly elected to sell to a developer. Essentially their life’s work, it’ll be torn down, the hilltop upon which it sits leveled, and eight or ten lesser dwellings built in its place. The neighbors aren’t happy about it, nor are the preservationists (it’s regarded as something of an architectural masterpiece) but it doesn’t fit the definition of “highest and best use”.
@9 That may be an even more horrid insult to vaginas than using that term to refer to Ann Coulter.
Another Joe Conason in commentary in Rasmussen Reports:
Rich Catholics Threaten Pope Francis – Because He Frightens Them
I’m amused by that “incapable of feeling compassion for the poor” bit.
@17 Either Langone’s an idiot or he assumes everyone else is. What Francis is saying, in perhaps more blunt language, is exactly the same thing Benedict was before him–that unfettered capitalism has shown itself to be an utter failure at fulfilling humankind’s most basic needs.
He’s also providing an object demonstration of how fear and greed come from the same root.