I agree with you that borrowing when needed is good, but excessive borrowing can create crisis. Karl Marx did foresee this:
Owners of capital will stimulate the working class to buy more and more of expensive goods, houses and technology, pushing them to take more and more expensive credits, until their debt becomes unbearable. The unpaid debt will lead to bankruptcy of banks, which will have to be nationalised, and the State will have to take the road which will eventually lead to communism.
From your link:
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Laura of 11D says this quote is making the rounds of Wall Street.
...
And indeed, searching all three volumes for "houses" and "homes", which are a pretty straight one-to-one translation, yields nothing that sounds remotely like this.
Every time I see one of these things, I wonder. Who the hell makes them up? And why? What do you get from passing your mediocre musings off as the work of a long-dead revolutionary?"
Yeah, because technology did not exist before the internet... The word may not have been used that way back then, but the 1867 equivalent of an expensive smartphone bought as a status symbol rather than for its actual utility would have been a pocket watch.
Owners of capital will stimulate the working class to buy more and more of expensive goods, houses and technology, pushing them to take more and more expensive credits, until their debt becomes unbearable. The unpaid debt will lead to bankruptcy of banks, which will have to be nationalised, and the State will have to take the road which will eventually lead to communism.
Karl Marx, Das Kapital, 1867
Another citation here:
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2009/01/faux-mar...
Edit: markup