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Dear Diary,

Wall Street reconvenes today after a long holiday. Investment advisers, economists and soothsayers have given us their guesses and wishful thinking about where the world is headed in 2015.

Most see “more of the same.” They're buying the dips. And waiting for corporate boards to approve more share buybacks.

They're sure that if anything goes wrong, Janet Yellen will come to the rescue.

And they're probably right. “More of the same” is what we usually get.

But not always…

Last week, we were exploring “solutions.”

Frequently we comment on the Fed's bubbles… and the inevitability that they will pop and cause widespread misery. Some readers think it mean-spirited of us not to offer a solution that will avoid the suffering.

Some even think we are looking forward to a catastrophe just so we can say I told you so.

An explanation is needed…

Marx Was Right!

Right before Christmas, we spent some time in Washington, D.C., renewing our ties to the activist community.

We attended a meeting of conservatives – some of whom we had known 30 years ago, as director of the National Taxpayers Union.

We were called on to explain ourselves. Why had we forsaken the public interest sector? What were we up to now?

We demurred. We didn't have the heart to tell them how we had been won over to Marx's viewpoint. Karl Marx had plenty of bad ideas. But he had at least one good one: historical determinism.

It is not the consciousness of men that determines their social being, but their social being that determines their consciousness.

Or as Marx put it:

At a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces of society come in conflict with the existing relations of production or – what is but a legal expression for the same thing – with the property relations within which they have been at work hitherto.

From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into fetters. Then begins an epoch of social revolution.