The Stewardship of Wealth: Successful Private Wealth Management for Investors and Their Advisors, + Website

Seize the Means of Production!

Marx famously believed that conflicts between the middle-class owners of productive enterprises (the “bourgeoisie”) and the workers in those enterprises (the “proletariat”) would result in the collapse of capitalism. When this happened, the workers would seize control of the government, ban private ownership, and all profits would thereafter accrue to the state, which would redistribute the wealth far more broadly.

Such a revolution actually did occur in Russia, and the state did in fact ban private property. And for a while, this worked magnificently, as Russia evolved from a backward, peasant society into the second most powerful country in the world in less than 30 years (1917–1945). Unfortunately, once the USSR's simple industrial society found it necessary to evolve into a vastly more complex postindustrial society (to compete with the United States), top-down command strategies proved to be no match for bottom-up free market strategies, and the USSR went the way of the dodo bird.

In Western Europe, pure communism in the Marxist sense was never adopted. Instead, Europe found a “middle way.” Socialist governments dominated the landscape for many years after World War II and those governments tended to nationalize not the entire economy but only the most important industry sectors—especially banks, infrastructure (transportation, communications, and energy) and large employers. Smaller enterprises were generally permitted to remain in private hands. ...