When I was young and the Soviet Union was in full bloom, there was a prevalent believe in this country and around the "free" world that communism was theoretically a wonderful system that hadn't worked in practice because of the greed of its administrators and the selfishness of people in general; that somehow mankind was not yet worthy of the marvelous benefits that communism would bring if only it were practiced altruistically. Various attempts have been made to practice modified versions of communism with hope of avoiding the pitfalls brought on by man's selfishness. These attempts have usually been called Socialism or by some other name involving "social" something or other. Each has failed or is in process of limping along, some more miserably than others, the misery always in proportion to the compromise of freedom.
Names such as "Democratic Socialism" are popular because they imply a neat compromise allowing the people to be "free" to produce while government distributes the wealth. That this is a blatant contradiction is lost on the masses that have generally been taught that democracy is good, but wealth is evil. If mankind could somehow thread the needle to allow enough freedom to create wealth, and then redistribute that wealth to everyone, the system would be perfect! This trap is sprung because the masses do not understand that capitalism, not democracy, is the opposite of communism. Because democracy (more accurately, constitutional republicanism) is a prerequisite for a free society and freedom is a prerequisite for capitalism to exist, the two terms democracy and capitalism, are mistakenly considered somewhat synonymous but with democracy having positive connotations and capitalism having negative connotations because of its association with the evils of undistributed wealth.
Democracy does not mean capitalism. In fact, if the government of a democracy is not limited by a viable constitution designed to protect the individual from the majority, then socialism by one name or another is almost certain to evolve.
The theory of how communism is an ideal lives on because there's a tremendous tendency for people that believe in it to become teachers/professors. I don't think there's anything sinister in this tendency, I believe that these people truly want to make the world a better place and one way to do so is to influence young minds. Like minded students enjoy the world of academia because their teachers and professors validate their "idealistic" thoughts. Students that enjoy academia often become teachers or professors. Thus the cycle continues while young people that sense something wrong with socialistic tendencies are left without validation and often without the ability to express their thoughts because attempts to do so in academia are met with scorn. Such students, if bright, usually pursue the physical sciences where they are welcome rather that the social sciences where they are not.
So this theory of the idealism of communism and/or socialism lives on, primarily in those that are the most insulated from it (Hollywood) or who temporarily benefit from it. Those of us who pay for it are less enamored, but too many of us still buy into the theory, at least, well... theoretically. I'm here to state that communism and its sneaky little brother, socialism are not just bad and unworkable in practice, they are fundamentally immoral systems. Any system that forcibly takes from an individual the fruits of his/or/her labor/genius/good fortune is an immoral system. It doesn't matter what the system does with the stolen loot. Giving it to less fortunate people doesn't make the theft moral. Using it to build national monuments doesn't make the theft moral. Governments often do immoral things with the money that they steal, but even if they don't use the money for immoral purposes, the theft of the money is immoral. This is not saying that a government taxing its citizens in a fair way to support the proper functions of government is immoral, but taxing for purposes of redistributing wealth is.
The defense against this cycle of socialistic thinking is that we must not leave it to the colleges and universities to teach our children to think. We should begin teaching our children to think when they are very young and we should try to avoid the tendency in anyone teaching a young person how to think of believing that the task is successfully completed when the young person sees things the way the teacher does. That is unfortunately what your student's school teachers and professors are likely to do, but you owe it to your child to truly teach them the ability to reason, to argue a position, to hear an argument, to agree or disagree based on sound processes of thought rather than on bromide or common assumption. If a parent truly teaches a child to think, then the resulting young adult can attend any university and be confronted with the theory of communism's idealism and be in a position to evaluate the theory, hopefully see its flaws, to present an alternate belief, and perhaps to have an impact on others.
It is impossible to teach a child both how to think, and what to think.
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