Imagine this: You, a middle class individual, discover an economic breakthrough. Soon, you create a business that starts off small, but soon dominates. You are incredibly rich! You hear a doorbell ring. It’s the government. You need to pay your taxes. The bill is ginormous! By the time you pay everything, you will have a fraction of your original money. But how would one defy the  all-powerful government and not pay?

 

This is exactly what it is like for a rich entrepreneur who lives under a socialist regime. They get blissfully robbed for the sole fact of their capita. The unbalanced tax rates are not just extremely unjust because of who’s paying it, but also where the money goes. Socialists believe that money should be taken from the rich and given to the poor. This may have worked it Robin Hood, but it is a entirely different in real life. The people there were corrupt, but most rich people in real life, are not corrupt.

 

Socialism began in 1848 by Karl Marx, a German philosopher. While many socialistic policies were used by monarchs and democracies before, Marx summed it all up. He decided to spread it through a novel called the Communist Manifesto. Communism, Marx’s ideology, is a extreme form of socialism under a authoritarian regime. The idea of communism spread through the entire world, but took almost a hundred years to grow popular. The first communist country was founded in 1922 under Vladimir Lenin and named the Soviet Union. Another group of communists arose in China. After World War 2, a new era dubbed The Cold War emerged. Americans and Soviets participated in a multitude of civil war with lesser countries with the attempt of stopping or spreading socialism. Wars were fought in almost every continent on earth, the most famous of these being The Vietnam War. These wars continued to an extent of the USSR sending nukes to Cuba and the US sending nukes to Turkey. The world was one tiny battle away from WW3. But it thankfully never happened.

 

Do you think that when Americans died in these vastly foreign countries, they were doing it for no reason? They fought for the freedom of other countries. In the Soviet Union, people couldn’t even say that the government was “not that good” without being sent to a labour camp.

 

People tend to forget about how more people died under Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union, around 15 million. Or the millions of children who died under Mao Zedong’s China. Or the extreme humanitarian crises in North Korea. The list goes on and on and on. These are only some of the atrocities committed under communist regimes.

 

My call for action is not to ban socialism and communism. Restricting the reaches of free speech would be almost as bad. No, what I’m saying is for people to inform themselves on what these issues actually mean. What I hope is that we can learn from these mistakes in the past and strive for actual equality, while maintaining our liberty.