Socialism and communism, in the forms that actually took power, did the same first things: abolish private property in the name of the people, put a party over the law, and punish the person who reports that the numbers are a lie. Then came the shortages, the secret police, and the famines with names.
The Holodomor in Soviet Ukraine, 1932–33. Mao’s Great Leap Forward, 1958–62. Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. These are not ‘excesses.’ They are what happens when the harvest belongs to the plan and the planner cannot be fired. Millions died because a theory was more precious than a farmer.
Venezuela sat on oil and a once-prosperous civic life. Twenty-first-century socialism expropriated, printed, and drove the skilled out. People walked to Colombia. That is the grocery test in reverse: when the shelves empty, the honest leave, and the party still has the microphone.
The American grocery aisle is not a miracle. It is prices, property, and a truck that does not need a commissar. A dictatorship cannot run that aisle because it cannot tolerate the information — a price — that would prove the plan is wrong.