Capitalist Candy

A class of twenty seven students is very hungry. Fortunately, there is a special machine in the classroom which can address their food needs. This special machine makes M&Ms out of essays, dispensing a maximum of 2700 every day. To get M&Ms for their growling stomachs, students write essays and turn them in for M&Ms. A grade-A essay nets three M&Ms, a grade-B essay two, and a grade-C essay one. The class is mostly happy with their M&M machine, but after a while young Karl notices something... Some of his classmates are consistently getting more M&Ms than others. What's more, not all of these classmates are good writers! He observes his seemingly more privileged classmates to find out their secret. Sam is always loaded with M&Ms, so Karl decides to watch him closely. Sam writes a grade-C essay. Instead of feeding it to the machine though, he goes to the teacher and gives her two of his M&Ms. In return, the teacher proofreads the essay and turns it into an grade-A+ paper. Sam takes the new paper and turns converts it to ten M&Ms. Karl is amazed. He tells nineteen of his classmates (who don't get a lot of M&Ms) about it, and they establish that from now on all essays should be proofread by the teacher before being turned in to the machine. The next day, the twenty excited students walk up to the teacher with essays in hand - but there's a problem. The teacher is already proofreading the essays of the seven other students in the class! In fact, those seven students have reserved her proofreading skills for the next five days using their M&Ms. Karl starts to think very hard...

He thinks so hard that he develops a worldview which profoundly shapes political and economic thought as time passes. Eventually, after the deadliest war that was never fought, it seems to lose influence, but we know better than that. Marxism today is applied differently, but its ideas are still relevant. In a world where the gap between the rich and the poor grows wider exponentially, a shadow of a doubt begins to form in our minds. Eventually, a question must be answered: does wealth naturally concentrate in the hands of the few in capitalist societies? Is there a darker side to Smith's Invisible Hand? Marx produced an extreme and somewhat generalized model of society - there are certainly more than just two social classes in the modern world, and their interactions are probably too complex to be predicted or described in one overarching theory. Yet clearly we have come across economic times which reflect Marxist predictions to a certain degree. Will a spectre once more haunt the world?