The sign is an apothegm, not a slogan: one road, one direction, no U-turns allowed. Behind you a mountain of skulls, the blood-red legend dripping over the last century’s most ambitious lucubration. Ahead, gold-paved motion under prices that tell you you are wrong before the graveyard does. This is not subtle. It is not supposed to be. Wear the choice you already made.
The fashionable still treat the experiment as a style, a seminar-room velleity that “never really happened.” History has been less indulgent.
The Record That Does Not Reverse
Communism as practice nationalized industry, suppressed rivals, and treated the plan as law. The arithmetic is planetary. The Black Book of Communism tallied crimes, terror, and repression at more than 94 million—China 45–72 million, the Soviet Union 20 million, Cambodia 1.3–2.3 million.[1] The Holodomor starved 3.5 to 5 million in Ukraine.[2] Mao’s Great Leap produced the largest policy famine in modern record.[3] The Khmer Rouge killed 1.7 to 2.2 million, a quarter of a nation, in killing fields.[4]
Power did not wither. To abolish private capital you need a center that can seize factories and farms; that center needs police and a monopoly on truth. The result was Gulag, laogai, class labels, and the Stasi file as a way of life. When people could leave, they left toward markets. The Berlin Wall was not built to keep Westerners out.[5]
Freedom has many difficulties and democracy is not perfect, but we have never had to put a wall up to keep our people in.
The knowledge problem remains. Prices pack scarcity and taste into a number a stranger can use. A ministry does not have that information; factories lie, stores hide inventory, and computers multiply bad data as easily as good. Mises and Hayek showed that without private property and free prices, calculation collapses. You can still issue orders. You cannot know if they are sane.
Solzhenitsyn, who had seen the camps, put the West’s lingering infatuation with the corpse: “For us in Russia, communism is a dead dog, while for many people in the West it is still a living lion.”
Capitalism is not virtue. It is error-correction: profit and bankruptcy, exit cheaper than revolt, failure kept local. Inequality of wealth is not equality of fear. Standing athwart history yelling stop is not grievance; it is the refusal to reverse into the catafalque. Some directions you do not reverse. Keep driving.