Naked book-burning economists in the Garden State! Who knew? Sorry, I was just being capricious. Besides, I like many other economists--Smith, Keynes, Simon, Pigou--in addition to you.

You can burn the Manifesto if you wish, but perhaps we shouldn't write off Marx entirely.  

If I recall Das Kapital properly, Marx thought that capitalists got their capital by misappropriation. Then they substituted capital for labor, including their own work. Not only were they lazy, but they got returns they really didn't deserve. A generation of swine.

Consider our own use of fossil fuels, the greatest source of concentrated labor-substitute the world has ever seen. Certainly future generations will believe that we misappropriated oil and gas, a one-off capital acount given to humanity by nature. We got enormous returns (both wise and foolish) from the happy accident of fossil fuels, and flared off the fruits of millions of years in a couple of centuries.

And when the oil and gas is all gone, we'll have to substitute labor for the capital we squandered. One could write a sci-fi economic morality play as opium for the masses ...