I enjoyed Peter Volny’s letter in answer to the lady who apparently was unfamiliar with the meaning of socialism for nations and their people. To amplify a bit, although those in the Soviet satellites he described had little, the party leadership and members (about 5 percent in the former Soviet Union) lacked for little. Their food was fresh in stores available only to them, their apartments and dachas well-stocked and furnished.

Socialism gives otherwise unremarkable persons, Joe Biden or Kamala Harris for example, great power over others. They can have state organs, say the FBI, arrest people without a warrant and then have a judge put a gag order on the detainee so that it becomes a crime for the detainee to tell anyone why he was arrested. In the socialist state of China, the leadership can order that healthy people have their organs “harvested” so that they can be sold to others for transplants.

In socialist paradises like Cuba, China, North Korea or Venezuela, they don’t have to pretend that no cameras are working to assist with the suicides of people they find inconvenient, people like Jeffrey Epstein.

The socialist nations tell you where you can live, where you can work and how much money you can have – depending on how much of it you can give to them. The police and spies are everywhere, sort of like our NSA, only worse. They invite and encourage a “whistle-blower” culture where children and others rat out their parents. The culture of fear, sort of like the COVID-19 hyperbole, is endemic. Like Machiavelli centuries before socialism, they know that fear makes people easy to control. Because socialism naturally works contrary to human nature, it always requires that control.

If you want socialism, you had better become one of the leadership.