Workforce for Benjamin Franklin and Essay

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People who work often do more harm than good and fundamentally distort the basic and good human drives to enjoy life and to treat their friends with kindness.

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In their essay "Proletarians and Communists" Marx and Engels point out notable abuses of the capitalist system of their era (Marx & Engels 96). Marx and Engels propose a solution to the social inequalities of bourgeois democracy (or non-democracy, as they think of it) in the form of a dictatorship of the proletariat, where everything is owned in common, and decision-making takes place in a common fashion. The problem with Marxism in action, however, is that such a consensus is difficult to achieve on a mass scale, and Marx and Engels are proposing a mass scale, international revolution. The result is that to enforce a proletarian dictatorship requires a strong-armed leader and bureaucracy, and the administrators of that bureaucracy become the new 'haves' of the system, as existed in the politically corrupt Soviet Union.

Eric Hoffer's distrust of mass scale revolutions in general reinforce a wariness to create dictatorships of 'groups,' given that poor systems of decision-making are likely to result, equally if not as bad as those lead by individuals in democratic capitalism. The one virtue democratic capitalism has, in the instance of a poor 'collective' decision, such as electing a poor leader, at very least, is that it offers greater flexibility and change. A modern capitalist democracy can become more capitalistic or slightly more socialistic, depending on the needs of the historical moment. This evidenced in America's shift in economic policy, from the rampant capitalism of the robber barons at the beginning of the century, to the public works designed to bring back the national economy during the New Deal, to the deregulation after the 1970s, to now. In contrast, in an official Marxism there is an official ideology that does not shift.

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On a more basic level, as argued by Tom Bethell in "Property in History" there is a natural, human desire to have property and privacy, and to pass that land onto one's children. One could even argue it is a kind of basic, evolutionarily 'hard-wired' drive to do so within the human animal. Strict Marxism demands the individual sacrifice familial feeling, and to allow his or her land to be ceded back to the state after death, taking away any incentive to work harder -- and lacks a system of incentives to encourage hard work in most arenas, including that of the workplace, where everyone is paid nearly the same. And also, proletarian dictatorships demand that the desire to break off into private enterprise, to have more privacy and property than one's neighbor and other drives are stifled by the state, which can result in hampering creativity as well as social inequality. Is creativity a worthy sacrifice for equality? To answer yes means to sacrifice one's freedom to challenge conventional wisdom. The stagnation of creativity that Marxism creates does not simply hurt individuals but, to use Joseph Schumpeter's argument in "The Process of Creative Destruction," also hampers history, as individuals have no incentive to create new ways of doing business….....

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