Incentive and Over-Production

In “Proletarians and Communists,” Marx argues, “It has been objected that upon the abolition of private property, all work will cease, and universal laziness will overtake us.  According to this, bourgeois society ought long ago to have gone to the dogs through sheer idleness; for those of its members who work, acquire nothing, and those who acquire anything do not work.” I am not totally sure what the situation was at the time he wrote this, but I know that for today (in the United States, at least) many of the owners or heads of massive corporations have worked hard to get themselves to where they are. If you destroy the incentive of gaining more, what’s the point of learning more and working harder? On the contrary, I found Marx’s “epidemic of over-production” to be a very interesting concept because it seems to me that it might just be taking place right now.

I commented on Brannen Uhlman's post.