Harangue

Garet Garrett wrote one last, and truly spectacular, novel: called Harangue: The Trees Said to the Bramble Come Reign Over Us. The subtitle comes from the Bible (Judges 9:15), and the metaphor here refers to the strange penchant of the rich to fund socialism, which kills the rich and consumes wealth.
Garrett illustrates the strange tendency in a story of politics, economic folly, conspiracy, ideology, and violence. Published in 1926, it deals directly with the real-life attempt to create a Workers Paradise in the United States, in North Dakota from 1918 to 1921.
The plot pits two socialist movements against each other in a battle for control. The I.W.W. was the American movement anarchosyndicalist reds — socialist "anarchists" who believed the violent strike would usher in utopia. Meanwhile, the Non-Partisan League was the American movement of pinks, the social democrats who wanted full socialism but with liberties (so long as they could be tolerated). They joined together in to lay siege to the governor's office, and then nationalized the mills and the banks. They raised taxes, nationalized insurance and did a thousand other dangerous things that sank the economy and led to the recall of the governor.
The setting for this novel, then, is dramatic, and the story is wonderfully fertile for economic insight. Garrett details what happens to an economy when central planners are in charge, with a special focus on pricing problems and production decisions. He explains what happens when a bank no longer deals with the problem of risk.
But what is especially interesting is his treatment of the sociology of the rich. Garrett has an enormously insightful take on what turns the rich into supporters of the reds.
In the precapitalistic age, the rich were distinguished for what they owned. But in the capitalistic age, this is hardly possible, since most of what the rich acquire becomes available to the middle class before long. So the super rich look elsewhere: to exotica in art, architecture, music, and, finally, ideology. Radical socialist theory is something the super rich can purchase and support that the middle class will not — and this is precisely what is so attractive about it.