What Socialism Is. Socialism is not a real model to be applied in the world – it is a contradictory rhetoric used to gain power over people, by manipulating those who are easiest to manipulate. It is anti-life, because it contradicts reality. Its contradictions stay harmless only as long as it stays on paper. Try to implement it, and they come due. It postulates equality – and produces the most unequal societies of all: the nomenklatura in its special shops, everyone else in the queue. It says it frees the workers – and in 1980, ten million Polish workers had to rise up against the workers' state. It postulates abundance – and gets rid of the people who produce it. Venezuela, sitting on the largest oil reserves in the world, watched its people lose an average of eleven kilos in a single year. It says the state will wither away – and builds the biggest state in history. It postulates peace – and needs an enemy for every failure. "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs." Needs, of course, especially of the immoral, are unlimited. Ability is punished. Someone has to resolve these contradictions. In socialism, that someone is the police, by force. When the theory says one thing and reality another, it is never the theory that gets arrested. That is why it is anti-life. Life works by getting reality right: every living thing survives because it reads the world correctly. Socialism switches off the instruments – prices that say what is scarce, profits and losses that say what works, free speech that says what is wrong. A society that can no longer see where it is going ends up where socialist societies always end up: first the queue, then the famine and the camp. And yet it keeps coming back. Why? Because socialism is not an economic theory that failed. It is a technique of power that works. The economics always fails. The rhetoric never does – on those easiest to manipulate, and for those who rise by manipulating them. Socialism has never delivered what it says. It has always delivered what it is for: power.