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constant since the turn of the century, except for the blip during the depression years. And this is fundamentally because of the number of immigrants that the United States allows into the country who cycle out of poverty withing eight years. The number of millionaires has grown every year since the end of the civil war. A nation like Japan, which is aggressively capitalist, has almost no poverty, a tremendous middle class and a burgeoning upper class.

In the same terms, the Soviet Union, during its reign, and pre-capitalist People's Republic, and Cuba have all shown that Socialism, in its purest form, results in the destruction of the middle class at one smooth stroke, the plunging of an entire nation into what the United States would consider far below the poverty level, and the reservation of millionaire status for only the political elite.

2. Automation would result in the loss of profits and the destruction of capitalism. Quite the contrary is true. Automation has proven to be a stimulus for any economy, and inevitably results in increased profits, lower costs for goods and an actual increase in employment rates.

3. Capitalist societies result in greater loss of freedom and civil rights. Marx thought that capitalism naturally alienated the proletariat and disenfranchised him. Although there were some strides in socialist countries to end bigotry and racial discrimination, the vast movement of the communist society is toward more and more exclusive and homogeneous communities that are intolerant of differences. Consider the pogroms against gays in the USSR, or PRC. Consider the imprisonment of punk rockers in Cuba. The truth of the matter is that Socialist nations can thrice only under a blanket of complete and total authoritarian control over social processes, with the aid of government control of all media and a vicious and restrictive police.

4. By instituting atheism and the elimination of a moral and ethical absolutism, Communism was thought to actually increase the amount of civility in a nation. The truth of the matter, though, was that Socialist regimes survived mostly by becoming more and more repressive, and the people, especially the proletariat, became more and more secretive and vindictive.\

5. Communism posits that workers in a capitalist society continue to lose autonomy and value in the society as the wealthy acquire more and more wealth. The truth of the matter, though, is that under capitalist rule, SKILLED labor actually increases in value so much that guilds and unions actually acquire greater political power than they control in Socialist countries, where the only political power comes from an unelected elite.

There are any number of reasons why communism does not work. Fundamentally, it is a flawed philosophical system that attempts to look at historical movements as battles between social and economic classes, whereas history doesn't seem to work that way. In modern capitalist nations, movement between social classes is fluid and vibrant. Take, for example, the rise of a thriving middle class rising from immigrants of Africa. Many immigrants from Africa, as pigmentally differentiated from their Afro-American citizens, seems to be moving from the ranks of the lower classes into the entrepeneurial middle class and upper class at much higher rates than the indigenous Afro-Americans. It actually seems that racism is not a very good excuse for not rising out of the lower classes. Until the twenty-first century experiments with capitalism in Communist China, any change out of the morass of poverty created by Socialism, any rising out of one economic class into another, was next to impossible without actually becoming a ruling member of the party.

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