Hold up. You started out making good points.
>"The sanest people, I think, are those happily unafflicted with ambition — whether for power, wealth, fame or achievement — who want only to work at some useful job, to love someone and to live in a nice place with some wind chimes on the porch."
>This is beginning to sound like the Communist Manifesto.
Then completely jumped the rails here. There are some hints of a tendency toward Marx or Leninism, but no overt push in the direction of nationalization of the means of production. Rather these statements are consistent with being the echo of a general American sentiment if you go back as little as 100-150 years ago; particularly in more agrarian areas.
The trend toward the accumulation of power/money, and being the center of the power structure; the rat race as it were, only started to become a prevailing ethos during the late 1800's, early 1900's with the first Gilded Age on the rise, and all the atrocities that came with advancement in the rat race becoming the primary multi-generational goal.
If there is a touch of Marx to be found, it's that he was the first to call out the inevitable excesses and vices of unfettered capitalism for it's own sake.
To me these statement you call out ring as an echo of the Jeffersonian Democrat. The Yeoman Farmer, cultivating the earth to grow enough for himself, and an excess with which to bolster his community. It speaks to me of industry of a different flavor. Where monolithic industries too big to fail are not allowed to exist, where information flows freely between competitors, and a corporation builds itself to the point it can do it's job without the push to diversify and building itself and it's executives into the industrialized lords of a horizontally and vertically integrated fiefdom, as widespread as legal circumstances allow.
I see the disappointed spectre of Locke, staring in horror at what has become a Hobbesian nightmare of a country. Where the Human clause is subordinated by being classed as a "resource" by the prevailing elite.
I see the desperation of the trodden upon, desperately leaning on each other to get by, swapping social capital and favors instead of wages, hoping for some change from above; a prospect stunted by the necessity to placate the gatekeepers of capital to be able to spread one's personality enough to participate in the legislative process. They look to an Executive branch, increasingly delegated to, and manipulated by the industrial monoliths that it is their sworn duty to regulate and minimize harm from; which is increasingly hamstrung in it's capacity to operate. The Justice System, the final bastion is tilted almost by design in favor of those with the capital to engage with the privileged class of the legally savvy; an increasingly difficult expertise to attain for the common man.
There is so much more in that paragraph than some Red Menace bogeyman. There is a cry for help. A shout of warning that the rolling stone of progress is starting to get a bit out of control. A keen of a society so put upon by those sitting atop the wealth of the country pushing for more, more; from a people that are faced with a choice between seemingly "feeding the machine", or leaving it to collapse under it's own weight
I haven't been very enamored of some of the views printed in the Times recently, but this one certainly resonates...
It resonates with a hell of a lot more to it than "The commies are at it again."