No, I am a skeptic, not a Marxist. I try to keep this question of Einstein in mind: "What does a fish know about the water in which he swims all his life?" We

No, I am a skeptic, not a Marxist. I try to keep this question of Einstein in mind: "What does a fish know about the water in which he swims all his life?" We never know how much we are missing, what points of view will come and go back and forth between unrecognized and undeniable. I've been following these fashions for some time (I can trace my skepticism to reading Parkinson's Law when it was fairly new and I was 11 years old). When I was taking my degree in economics, the theory of the firm said that the firm exists to cooperatively advance the combined interests of its suppliers of capital, its suppliers of labor, and its customers. Later, that was expanded to also recognize the reasonable expectations of other 'stakeholders.' The apotheosis of wealth has changed that so much that deciding how much we have gained or lost is much like the index-number problem in economics -- unresolvable. We cannot value what we have today by standards that we used to embrace, nor can we value what we used to have according to today's standards. We cannot not change, but changes over time confound the problem of evaluating change. I might suggest that the single biggest cause of the runaway worship of vast wealth was the arrival of the New Hampshire lottery, the first modern lottery in the 50 states, subsequently imitated by almost all the others, in 1964. Now the man in the street can identify and sympathize with the millionaire because it is only a matter of time until the right numbers come out (lottery investments in the USA are now around $1.00 per capita per day). Belief in American capitalism runs on optimism; optimism and denial sustain each other. This too shall pass.