You may ask yourself...

The kiddos had a quiz the other day, and since our Prof. was absent, I had to go over the quiz with them. I feel a bit more comfortable in front of 250 people now. Although something odd happened.

Let me first say that I am a dyed in the wool capitalist. I have faith in the market system (and you gotta have faith). Granted it has some rather disastrous failings (health insurance, natural monopolies, etc) but any human system is flawed, and socialist solutions to these issues (such as government regulation) tend to give a result that is "as bad" if not worse. Capitalism is simply the best we've got, and the history of the 20th century shows that socialism/communism just can't quite survive when two conflict ("economic interpretation of history" anyone?). This should give you some context for my recent "Kafka moment".

In our intro course we were covering socialism and fascism. So naturally we had to hit the writings of Marx. The quiz question was:
"In most of Marx's writings he argues that:
a) socialism is better than capitalism and communism is best.
b) the downfall of capitalism is inevitable.
c) capitalism is no good and has made no major contribution to society.
d) capitalists are really fascists at heart."

Naturally it's a choice between a and b, which I paused to let some of the students duke it out ("A!" "No! B!"). Seeing as this was the last quiz of the semester I guess they were feeling frisky. So when I confidently announced (probably overstating a bit to try to compensate for my nervousness in front of that many people) that "the fall of capitalism is inevitable!", the "B" students suddenly broke out into uproarious applause.

... so yes. Just take that little bit out of context for a minute. I am announcing to a large audience that the "fall of capitalism is inevitable" and getting loud cheers. The other TA's were outright laughing in the front row.

How did I get here?