Quote Of The Day

Not sure how it ended up this way, but I’ve got three posts coming this morning on socialism/communism. First we’ve got Friedrich Engels, communist intellectual, opining on the American government in an 1891 work:

Society had created its own organs to look after its common interests…. But these organs, at whose head was the state power, had in the course of time, in pursuance of their own special interests, transformed themselves from the servants of society into the masters of society…. Nowhere do “politicians” form a more separate and powerful section of the nation than precisely in North America [i.e., the United States]. There, each of the two major parties which alternately succeed each other in power is itself in turn controlled by people who make a business of politics…. It is in America that we see best how there takes place this process of the state power making itself independent in relation to society …we find two great gangs of political speculators, who alternately take possession of the state power and exploit it by the most corrupt means and for the most corrupt ends — the nation is powerless against these two great cartels of politicians who are ostensibly its servants, but in reality dominate and plunder it.

His cure isn’t right, but I’ll be damned if he didn’t nail the symptom cold.