LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
What kind of totalitarianism would be required to determine everyone’s abilities and needs? What kind of dictatorship would be necessary to distribute the goods of the able to the wants of the needy? We know what kind. The kind of totalitarian dictatorship that the U.S.S.R and Mao Zedong’s China had. The Soviet Union and Maoist China are two more reasons that millennials love socialism. This is not because young people learned left-wing lessons from the Soviets and the Red Guards. It’s because they didn’t . Kids don’t get that communists are bad people. It was too long ago. The Berlin Wall fell in 1989. Deng Xiaoping began market reforms in China in 1978. I have two millennial daughters. The end of the Cold War and the beginning of China’s economic boom are as distant in time from them as the Great Depression and the Coolidge administration are from me.
To millennials, hearing the U.S.S.R. and Mao’s China used as examples of how socialism can go very, very wrong is like me hearing about the Kellogg-Briand Pact and the Smoot-Hawley Tariff. The only communist societies young people know anything about are the goofy outlier North Korea... and Cuba, where the Marxist- Leninism comes with cheap rum, ‘57 Chevys, communist societies young people know anything about, except one ... The communist society in which all young people grow up. “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need” is deeply stupid and completely impractical. And yet there’s a place where it works. This place is my house. And your house. And anywhere else there’s a family. To each according to his need... What don’t kids need? My 14-year-old son needs Mom to drive to school with his lunch, his homework, and one sock. Never mind that she packed his lunch, did his homework, and washed his socks – one of which he left behind this morning along with homework and lunch so that she has to drive back to school even though she just returned from driving him to school in the first place. From each according to Mom’s and Dad’s ability, not to mention the ability of Mom’s and Dad’s Visa card credit line and the bank loans we took out to pay for school tuition. The grim truth is... Kids are born communists. and Guantanamera sing-alongs. Or, I should say, these are the only
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Kids don’t get that communists are bad people.
10 October 2018
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