The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.

Karl Marx

I pass every April’s rain preparing for my favorite holiday – May 5th, birth date of Karl Marx, the father of communism. I sit in my corner chair, lulled by the roar of the electric space heater and raindrops striking the windowpanes. I hear neither, as I’m re-reading my collection of the great man’s work along with what, to my mind, is the most well written rundown of his life and thought, Thomas Sowell’s Marxism.

Born 192 years ago today in Trier, Germany, Karl Marx"grew up a brilliant and spoiled child" (Sowell, 165) then spent his college years driving his father to exasperation, poisoning his mind with Hegel, and writing of the day when he would obtain enough political power to"wander godlike and victorious...I will feel equal to the creator". (Sowell, 166) So even from his youth it’s safe to say the boy had issues. A man who knew him later in life commented"a most dangerous personal ambition has eaten away all the good in him" (Sowell, 183) so the wisdom of age slipped right through him, his monomania left every potential lesson unheeded and unlearned.

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