Marx: "Owners of capital, etc." Fake quote.

"Owners of capital will stimulate the working class to buy more and more of expensive goods, houses and technology, pushing them to take more and more expensive credits, until their debt becomes unbearable. The unpaid debt will lead to bankruptcy of banks, which will have to be nationalized, and the State will have to take the road which will eventually lead to communism."

You can hardly read a blog or a comments column on an online newspaper without seeing this from Marx, right on the money. Did he really say that? Really see it all coming? No he didn't. Well, maybe Groucho or Zeppo could have... But it's quoted everywhere to justify arguments about the current credit crisis (11000 google hits for the whole para) so.... But it's cobblers. It isn't written anywhere in his writings. Everyone quoting everyone else. An internet myth.

What it does show is that people will even look at a discredited ideology, so disenchanted are they by corruption and ineptitude that they even want to damn our system by comparison to the horrors of Communism.

It won't be lost on Brown and Co., either, that people will suspend their critical faculties and believe pretty much anything they're told if they hear it often enough.