Seeing as Michael Munger is doing an AMA tomorrow, I thought I would post a few of his recent writings.

In this piece, Munger takes up Karl Marx's description of Louis Bonaparte's rise to power in mid-nineteenth century France and deftly compares it to our current situation in most western nations.

This is the origin of what Engels and later Marxists called “Bonapartism”: a strongman state that arbitrates between deadlocked classes by suppressing genuine politics altogether.

Marx describes the French state machinery—grown enormous through generations of monarchy, revolution, and empire—as a parasite that Bonaparte inherited and further bloated, in spite of his promises to cut it back.

This is the setting for am interesting discussion of property rights. And a strong argument that the mistake many people make in reasoning about how things work is to think of collectives like the government, the working class, the poor, as real entities.

The road from “labor owns itself” to “a strongman speaks for labor” is not an accident of French politics in 1851; it is the road that opens up whenever a right is placed in hands that cannot, themselves, hold it.