To the editor:

The problem that Karl Marx wished to solve was that, in his view, multiple competing economic units, each interested only in maximizing its own short-term profits, would, in the long term, inevitably result in ceaseless political conflict, wasteful overproduction with rapid exhaustion of the world’s natural resources (what we now call environmental degradation), and, logically, the eventual extinction of Homo sapiens through war and/or starvation. 

His delusional utopian solution was a classless society with centralized economic planning. Experiments in that direction have resulted only in corrupt, nightmarish dictatorships with greater economic deprivation of the enslaved majority. Had he simply stuck with the description of the problem and despaired of finding any solution, he would have been right.

Dan V. Johnson,

Lawrence