When I was little, my parents used to tell me stories about how poor everyone was in the Soviet Union. Their two favorite examples were grocery bags and cars: people had to bring their own bags to the store, and almost nobody had a car. If you were lucky, you had a bicycle.
As a kid, these stories were both scary and hilarious. Bring your own grocery bags? Can you even imagine?
Then the 2000s arrived, and something strange happened.
In California, plastic grocery bags became a moral issue. Bringing your own bag was no longer a sign that the store could not provide one. It became a sign of virtue. Cities and towns started begging people to bike to work, not because they had no choice, but because it was supposed to reduce emissions. The old signs of Soviet poverty were repackaged as moral achievements.
That is the thing about Marxism. It is a mind virus. It rarely starts by admitting that it wants to make your life worse and make you less free. It starts with a religion of sacrificing for the greater good. It gives you rituals. It tells you what to say, what to feel guilty about, what to give up, and which obvious facts you are no longer allowed to notice.
Eventually, the logic inverts. Scarcity becomes virtue. Losing choices becomes progress. Poverty becomes holiness. The humiliations my parents remembered from Soviet life come back dressed up as enlightenment.
This is what I want my kids to understand: reject it. When a political movement asks you to stop trusting your eyes, reject it. When it tells you that less freedom is compassion, reject it. When it turns poverty into a sacrament and calls it progress, reject it completely.
The truth is not complicated. No society ever became great by conserving its resources. Great societies build, invent, produce, trade, explore, and create abundance.
Maximize freedom. Maximize wealth. Maximize the number of choices ordinary people have.
A society that creates abundance is better than one that teaches you to celebrate scarcity.
Reject the Marxist mind virus.