Last May, I posted a few objections to Matt Yglesias’s ode to Karl Marx. The gist of his praise was that Marx discovered that capitalism is prone to boom and bust, or periodic crises. I’ve never understood why this was a particularly brilliant insight. As I explained (see here and here), pretty much every remotely human system — and many non-human systems — are prone to periodic crises. It’s what makes them human. Anyway, what made me think of it was this story about Cuba hitting the skids (again):

Cuba gives ’socialism lite’ a try as recession deepens
Cuba’s workplace cafeterias are closing, President Raúl Castro keeps saying the well-off shouldn’t get the same subsidies as the poor, and now there are rumblings that one of the stalwart vestiges of the revolution — the ration booklet — has outlived its usefulness.
As the Cuban government struggles through a deep recession, its leaders have begun picking away at socialism in order to save it. But experts say the latest buzz by the Cuban government is simply another desperate fix to stem the slide of a failed economy that buckled long ago.
Even one of Havana’s leading economists recently said Cuba’s economy needed to be turned upside down — “feet up.” So taxi drivers got private licenses, farmers now have their own plots of land and government workers have to pack their own lunches.
“I think what they are trying to do is prepare the people for a hard landing,” said Cuba expert Jonathan Benjamin-Alvarado of the University of Nebraska. “The government is really saying in so many words: We’ve got limited resources and can only do so much. I think they are stuck.”