The Dismal Science

    I was going to start by saying something like: We all know Malthus.  Nah, no you don't. Thomas Robert Malthus.  Oxford educated, English cleric and seminal economist. 1766-1834.  Look it up.  That'll bore hell outta ya.
    His thoughts on political economy, economics and demographics are the reason Economics has been called the dismal science.  He postulated that any advance in technology or productivity would result in an increase in population that would always outstrip productivity and create and reinforce poverty.  Yeah, that's pretty dismal.  Put him together with Thomas Hobbes and ya got a real laugh riot.  Hobbes is the guy that said, for most, life was solitary, poor, nasty, brutal and short.
    His thoughts on productivity and poverty are what most people who have ever heard of Malthus remember about him but what stuck in my mind was something different he said and definitely more pertinent to our current debates.  Malthus said there were things that needed to be done that could never be done for a profit and those things fell into the purview of government.  Now, remember, this guy died more than a decade before Marx and Engles wrote.  He was no socialist.  He was actually an observer of and a contributor to the ideas and ideals of capitalism.  I'd be willing to bet Marx and Engles had read his works.  If you don't know and I'd be willing to bet you don't,  Marx and Engels wrote the "Communist Manifesto". I've read it.  That'll put your ass to sleep.  If you want, I can also tell you a bedtime story about the Hegelian Dialectic.
    The reason I mention this is because for no rational reason I can think of,  Bernie Sanders and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez have decided to proclaim themselves  Democratic Socialists. In reality, they're New Deal Democrats.  That opened the door for republicans to scream, SOCIALISM like they were yelling FIRE in a crowded theater.  Why start a debate with a bunch of ignoramuses?  I dunno.
    So we got the republicans saying, socialist this and socialist that because they hope you're stupid and we have the Democrats trying to say the police and fire departments, the military,   public water and sewer, public health, snow plows and so on are all socialist ideas, apparently, because they're stupid.  Nonsense.
     These are all parts of the Malthusian Equation and both sides had better stop talking like idiots or we're gonna end up with even more Reality TV personalities posing as leaders.  Across the political spectrum, no one is proposing socialism in the United States and our major corporations and the rich, in general, sure aren't proposing capitalism.  You can make the case Dr King was right when he said, we have socialism for the rich and rugged individualism for everyone else.  That's pretty dismal and needs to stop.