In the absence of truth, there is no penalty for failure. We seem destined to live in a failure-prone society. - L.K. Samuels

Chávez’s Marxist legacy continued under his successor, Nicolás Maduro, who watched Venezuela free fall into an economic abyss. The socialization of Venezuela resulted in a crisis where hospitals had no drugs or basic supplies, where the poverty rate went from 30 percent in 1999 to 87 percent in 2016, chronic food shortages erupted, and children and the sick began dying from malnutrition.

By almost all measures, the Hitler’s German Labor Front carried out most of their pro-labor promises while Lenin and Stalin ran roughshod over their proletariat subjects. Conditions for workers and peasants alike plunged after Lenin nationalized independent labor unions and the economy. Violent labor strikes paralyzed Russian cities while, in the countryside, over one hundred peasant revolts erupted during early 1921 alone. Unlike Hitler’s Germany, thousands of striking Russian workers were shot, imprisoned, or executed, particularly during the blood-soaked saga of the Kronstadt rebellion in March 1921.

Some scholars now refer to the Democratic Party’s long-time support of slavery and supremacy as the epitome of a ‘thievery society,’ where the societal collectives own and control everything, even people. Such a thievery polity would bestow on governing bodies the authority to steal anything with immunity, for whatever noble or ignoble purpose. Perhaps this is why William Lloyd Garrison (1805–1879), the most prominent abolitionist in the United States, denounced slavery as an institution of ‘man-stealing,’ writing: ‘Every slave is a stolen man; every slaveholder is a man-stealer.’ The concept of self-ownership, which dates from John Locke, opposes slavery, socialism, and authoritarianism, because they would inhibit or prohibit individuals from pursuing ownership of property. In this way, any Borg-like collective would have the authority, often over the wishes of individual citizens, to bar people from running their own lives as they see fit—literally making slaves of the populace.