When two ambitious young men whose idealistic thoughts brought them great fame collaborated on their project The Communist Manifesto, God must have really hated us. Since then, countries have fallen like a pile of dominoes to communism's deathly grasp, clenching at the throats of the innocent, the socialist disease spreading like the Black Death, the poor people swelling, bleeding, dying. Although many countries have succeeded in purging it, today the ominous cloud still hangs over the world. The blind advocate of communism in any country or state ought to be dragged to a sanitarium in a straight jacket; communism creates artificial equality at the expense of the people, discourages healthy work ethics, and allows tyrannical governments to oppress the people.

The major premise that attracts people to support communism'that attracted Marx and Engels to invent it'revolves around the equality that would result from a communistic society. Pure communism in theory destroys all social classes and may achieve more or less absolute equality, but its supporters must remember they live not in a hypothetical world but in a real one; in practice, things never work out exactly as they do in the mind. In real life, communism takes away all that a worker makes. The money and goods and ideas snatched from the rightful hands of the workers filter through a layer of government blubber, which, like a plugged sieve, traps a good percentage of the whole, much of it spent as salaries for mindless, inefficient government drones. The government then redistributes whatever that is left to the people, who by then receive only a portion of what they have worked for and made. Sometimes, the government would assure the people that what it has done is for their own good and that an enforced equality offers a fair utopia to all. But try telling that to those who work hard to give their families the best but receive only the same low pay for their entire lives. Try telling that to those who supported communism to promote equality only to find themselves poorer and with no way out of dingy factories. In abolishing social wealth hierarchy, another one forms'the new one, though, becomes more heinous and deleterious than the old has ever been. Instead of social classes that evolve from a natural, capitalistic economy, in communism, the government gives itself enough power to force false equality down the throats of its people no matter the outcome, and, consequently, two major classes form: the government officers who work little and earn much and the citizens who work much but earn little. How does an environment in which the average citizens remain static and oppressed all their lives promote any type of progress?

It doesn't. In a competitive market, people vie with each another for jobs, forcing them to improve and become better candidates for work. This intense drive to progress has kept and will continue to keep the capitalists successful. However, communism fails to give people the motivation they need to advance. Who would work harder when everyone gets the same pay regardless of extra effort? Who would sacrifice free time to work when the marginal benefit of overtime does not exist? Communism begets laziness, laziness begets failure, and failure begets nothing. A communist country produces nothing but a lethargic society that gets increasingly poorer as no one has the incentive to be innovative, to create new ideas that can compete in a domestic or international marketplace. Such a system that discourages energetic work ethics not only deters progress but may also reverse it.

To make things worse, the even lazier government gluttons leech off the people's work by sheer force. In communism, no citizen owns anything; every building, business, piece of land belong to the government'they belong to 'society.' Communism abolishes private ownership, as if the common people possess such inadequate ability to look after themselves that the government has to take these poor, floundering beings under its protective wing. Unfortunately, the communist government does not protect the people; it suppresses them. Infallible divinity does not make up the government. Why should people no more intelligent and able than any other citizen have the right to command the 'fair' distribution of land and capital? People have the right to decide what to do with the money that they earn. Take that right away, and you destroy democracy and the freedom it stands for. A lofty idea such as redistributing wealth would encounter too much opposition in a democracy; communism therefore often comes hand in hand with totalitarianism. History has seen this happen with Fidel Castro's Cuba, Pol Pot's Cambodia, and even the fascist Nazi Germany (Nazi being the shorter name for National Socialism). Promoting communism promotes oppression. Capitalism creates the social classes based on wealth; communism serves as a way for the corrupted government leaders to secure the wealth and maintain their position at the top of the social ladder, chaining the people below them forever.

If someone wants to become a dictator, he should advocate communism and, as a demagogue, fire up the emotions of the lower and middle classes. Once he gets their support, he could then subject them to an eternity of bondage. He would fool anybody who believes that a flawless, caring, despotic government can control the people's money and possessions better than they can themselves. He would fool anybody who wishes to rise in society but does not want to work for it, the ones who look for an easy way of gaining relative wealth by decreasing everyone else's. He would fool anybody who wistfully wishes for a utopian society in which social and economic equality reigns supreme, the kind of society that only exists in dreams and drunken stupors. Poor things. At least they meant well.