There have been several countries in the last hundred years or so where a picture of Karl Marx’s kisser graced almost every room, and even scowled out hairily from billboards. Those places were all totalitarian hell holes, and equality was only achieved in everyone’s poverty and oppresion by the police state. Fences had to put up on the borders of those lands to keep the people from fleeing.

Socialism takes for granted that human nature is malleable, but it’s not. Everyone in never going to be on the same page. People are self interested, and that can’t be changed except by force, and not even then. Example: I live near two major engineering universities, and I end up riding the bus through them on occaision. The young students who are most of the other passengers are from literally every corner of the Earth. It’s beautiful. The best dressed passengers are always the young women from the PRC. They go all out with fashion forward clothes and shoes, interesting hair styles, well applied make-up, and they even smell good. Consider that their families going back at least three generation had to all wear the same military style Mao suit, with the little worker’s cap. Everyone, all the time, same outfit. Very equal. But that behavior didn’t take because it runs contrary to human nature. Given the opportunity to dress in a completely bougie way, these young women did.

For everyone to follow all of the rules to keep things equal, and socialism will have a lot of those rules, they will have to fundamentally change who they are and they can’t. And then the state will have to start making people who aren’t going with the program permanently disappear to make the point that the rules have to be followed. It happened everywhere that Karl Marx’s portrait hung on the wall.