We have lost the balance:

Here’s what Marx said:

“The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organized as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible.”

Think about what this means. All of the money and power would be focused in the state, but then the state would not do anything with that concentration of power. The state was innocent. There would be no cronyism, no corruption, no bureaucracy, and no concentration of stupidity so as to make mistakes much bigger.

This is precisely — without the proletarian aspects — the Obama worldview. Good citizens with high levels of education will be the philosopher kings, telling everyone what to eat, drive, and do for their own good. Naturally, these people would have no interests of their own. Naturally, their learning from books and theories rather than from real life would not lead them into really big mistakes.

And naturally this system will make the economy grow (“increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible”) rather than collapse because the people running the state know nothing about creating jobs or meeting a payroll or actually producing anything.

Then, there is Marx’s view of what later became known as the withering away of the state:

“When…all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character. … If the proletariat…makes itself the ruling class…then it will…thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class.”

What we have here today is not the triumph of the proletariat but the triumph of the managerial-bureaucratic-intellectual-cultural elite. The best describer of this is not Marx but James Burnham, a former Marxist whose writings in the 1940s were the basis for George Orwell in writing 1984. Then there is Karl Popper, who pointed out that the greatest threat to freedom (the “open society”) were those who thought they knew everything.

And those who seek political power, with few if any exceptions, are people set on accumulating power, glory, and wealth. All the more reason to limit what they can do.

Nevertheless, this grasping elite views itself as disinterested. It does not act from selfish motives but because it knows better than anyone else how to promote the public good. And even with the best will and highest morality that mortals are capable of achieving, political leaders and bureaucrats are still limited by their own worldview, life experience, and specific role (where you stand is where you sit, as one popular Washington, D.C., maxim has it).

There’s nothing here that would surprise America’s founders, who knew that freedom always depended on restraining such people.

Let’s hope we’re not too far gone.