It’s typical to read these days about the opulent lifestyles enjoyed by those who agitate against “the rich”—calling for higher taxes on “the rich” to help “the poor” or to salve “the planet’s” woes.  It would be tempting to think the phenomenon dates only as far back as the rise of “limousine liberals.”

Um.  No.

[...] Although young Engels was a faithful son and a reasonably conscientious businessman—eventually he became a partner—he also spent a good deal of his time modestly but persistently embezzling funds to support his friend and collaborator Karl Marx in London.

It would be hard to imagine two more improbable founders for a movement as ascetic as communism.  While earnestly desiring the downfall of capitalism, Engels made himself rich and comfortable from all its benefits.  He kept a stable of fine horses, rode to hounds at weekends, enjoyed the best wines, maintained a mistress, hobnobbed with the elite of Manchester at the fashionable Albert Club—in short, did everything one would expect of a successful member of the gentry.  Marx, meanwhile, constantly denounced the bourgeoisie but lived as bourgeois a life as he could manage, sending his daughters to private schools and boasting at every opportunity of his wife’s aristocratic background.

► Bill Bryson, At Home
Ch. XVIII, p. 420

I’ve had people chide me for suggesting Marx, far from being a true revolutionary, was in fact somewhat nostalgic for pre-industrial feudalism—yet what is life under Communist Party rule but a slightly re-imagined form of serfdom?  In what way has the life of the Party elite—whether Communist, or Social Democrat, or whatever flavor of statist—ever been different from that eagerly enjoyed by the founders of Communism?

In truth such people can only embrace state power as the solution to all mankind’s problems because they have tasted power and found it good. For them.

And that’s why so many statists remain convinced that the only reason their way keeps failing every time it’s tried, is because the wrong people were in charge.  Somewhere in our civilization, they maintain, there is a human philosopher’s stone who can transform their leaden ideology to gold.

There might well be, but he will not come from the best families or go to the best schools, and his life experience will almost certainly teach him that liberty and the rule of law are more likely to improve the lot of man than a bunch of vapid leftist cant.
 

Corrupt Bastards Crapaganda