You can't say to people, you're too weak to live with freedom, only that group is strong enough to live with freedom. - Alan Charles Kors

The cognitive behavior of Western intellectuals faced with the accomplishments of their own society, on the one hand, and with the socialist ideal and then the socialist reality, on the other, takes one's breath away. In the midst of unparalleled social mobility in the West, they cry "caste." In a society of munificent goods and services, they cry either "poverty" or "consumerism." In a society of ever richer, more varied, more productive, more self-defined, and more satisfying lives, they cry "alienation." In a society that has liberated women, racial minorities, religious minorities, and gays and lesbians to an extent that no one could have dreamed possible just fifty years ago, they cry "oppression." In a society of boundless private charity, they cry "avarice." In a society in which hundreds of millions have been free riders upon the risk, knowledge, and capital of others, they decry the "exploitation" of the free riders. In a society that broke, on behalf of merit, the seemingly eternal chains of station by birth, they cry "injustice." In the names of fantasy worlds and mystical perfections, they have closed themselves to the Western, liberal miracle of individual rights, individual responsibility, merit, and human satisfaction. Like Marx, they put words like "liberty" in quotation marks when these refer to the West.

Socialism, wherever it actually had the means to plan a society, to pursue efficaciously its vision of the abolition of private property, economic inequality, and the allocation of capital and goods by free markets, culminated in the crushing of individual, economic, religious, associational, and political liberty. Its collectivization of agriculture alone led to untold suffering, scarcity, and contempt for property as the fruit of labor.

When you have a planned economy and when you abolish private property, someone must make the decision "Plan in what ways? What do people need?" They now must make those purchase decisions for you. What should you really buy and what shouldn't you buy? Removing choice in the interest of a collective pursuit, those central planners who are one and the same time your schoolteacher, your landlord, your employer, and your police, that's an extraordinary concentration of power, ladies and gentlemen. That is an extraordinary concentration of power. They must get people of what we are planning for and you see this in the history of every communist society. Which means in the final analysis, they must govern the culture, they must control values. Its why religion or any independent thinking is such an enemy. They must control the values, the preferences, the culture, and the education and they must find ways to repress those who are urging different paths and elections don't take care of that because if you're planning an entire economy. If you're planning the allocation of all goods and services and human choices. You can't every four years turn around and say "Oh, lets abandon 'A' and do 'B'." Elections don't get you out of that dilemma.