It should be pretty obvious by now that Marx had (partly) the right diagnosis, but did not really have a clue about the cure. That's understandable though. It's

It should be pretty obvious by now that Marx had (partly) the right diagnosis, but did not really have a clue about the cure. That's understandable though. It's easy to say what's wrong about society.. harder to predict which fixes will work. I think the closest we can come to the socialist ideals, is to have a free market economy, but have the ownership of capital be more distributed. The government can not efficiently control the economy directly, at least not without some powerful, yet-to-be-invented, AI. The beauty of the free market is that it's basically an enormously powerful computer which, given the right conditions (relatively fluid markets, lack of monopolies, etc.), calculates the correct prices for goods and services for an efficient economy. Not utilizing that computer, without some equally good replacement, is doomed to fail. But the government (and by extension - in a decent democracy - the people) can be a responsible owner of capital. It requires some discipline, and low levels of corruption, but there are plenty of examples. I do think less government involvement is a more ideal solution, but it requires better technology and better organization. I think the way going forward, is to create a harder separation between capital and income, create a system where capital more naturally tend to distribute evenly among people, and to improve the efficiency and quality of stock markets.