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Famous dead people are good commentators on current events: They are no longer around to be challenged on their credentials, to elaborate on what they really meant to say, or to confirm or deny whether they actually uttered or wrote words now attributed to them. Therefore, putting words into their mouths is often an effective technique for making points about modern social or political issues — the credibility of such points is thereby bolstered through their association with the authority of experts who cannot be questioned. This example was emailed to us by a reader in February 2009: The appeal to (dead) authority is invoked for quotation reproduced above, purportedly a passage from Karl Marx's 1867 work, Das Kapital, positing that Marx foresaw the subprime mortgage meltdown and subsequent bailout of financial institutions of 2008-09 and warned that they presaged the coming of communism. Determining whether Marx ever wrote any such thing (in Das Kapital or some other work) should be a simple task, requiring no more than a text search of Marx's writings for a matching passage. However, the process is complicated by the fact that Marx wrote in German, so finding such a match would be dependent upon the vagaries of various translations of Marx's works from German into English. Nonetheless, for a variety of reasons we're confident about putting this one squarely into the False column: Given historical realities, if these lines about consumer debt were indeed written by Marx, it was more likely to have been Groucho than Karl.
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