Socialism is slavery, of one class to serve another.

Get busy, or take time and contemplate. Go out and earn, or slow down and earn less and enjoy life more. Everyone has a choice. Some may feel like they don't, with kids and mortgages and so forth, but everyone can be pressed to the point where they do what it takes to choose other. I'll use simple, small, easy to understand sums to make my metaphorical point here --

You bust your butt for $200. Somebody else works hard, but with less knowledge or fewer skills or lower market level skills, and so they make $100, half what you make. But you could make half what you make too, if you decided to do it. It would mean your kids did with less, you lived in a smaller house, and you didn't take vacations or have nice clothes, but you could do it if you needed to.

But you DON'T need to. You can earn the $200, by working hard and being smart and using your skills, and so for your family's sake, you do.

Now Bernie is in charge. And your $200 now becomes $100 just because you have too much, and you are a target for funding all the programs he has created for the people who make $100.
Are you feeling the pressure now? Working as hard, as well, as capably, as you always did, but now you have no more than the other guy because Bernie has drained you to PAY the other guy?

In fact, you work to earn $200 and now you only earn $100 because of all Bernie has taken from you to give to the guy earning $100... who now has $125 because of what Bernie gives him.

From YOUR earnings.

Now the other guy has MORE THAN YOU. And you are working pretty much to PAY HIM.

NOW... do you feel like continuing on your path of smart, knowledgable, skilled hard work for your family's sake?

Or do you feel more like dialing it back, doing less, earning less, to GET OFF THE LIST OF TARGETS, to stop the government from pillaging you, and to stop and smell the roses?

In fact, do you now deliberately target an income of $100, so that government will give you the money they took from the other guys making $200?

You COULD continue to generate more, while keeping less, but why WOULD you? You are working for someone ELSE, not for your own benefit and your family's benefit. What happens to your motivation?

It goes down the drain, that's what happens. Productivity isn't just skills plus effort. It's MOTIVATION, it's creativity, it's intensity of application of all your abilities to the tasks.

When motivation is gone, so is productivity.

How does government FUND all their largesse when people like you are choosing, by the millions, all over this country, to do less and earn less and produce less, just to get low enough to avoid being a TARGET of the takers?

Bernie and people like him stand up and declare its unfair that we don't have EVERY person at a certain level. But not every person is equipped to be at higher levels of earning and productivity. It is a set of gifts and skills that not everyone has. They are not EQUAL in that area.

And the act of PRETENDING everyone should be at a higher level is an act that causes people AT the higher level to LOWER their own levels by conscious decision. That lowers tax revenue, so govenrment cannot raise the level of the lower people who voted for them to do it.

The whole of socialism, folks, is a pretense that, in taking an enormous amount of the produced wealth from the productive, that it will NOT CHANGE THEIR MOTIVATIONS OR ACTIONS, and they will continue to produce at that high level, while the value of their productivity is stripped from them and given to others who are not productive. But it DOES change what they do.

The end result is that everyone IS equal; equally poor and miserable.

So... some work, others get the benefit. That's how it was in 1860, and we fought a civil war to end it. Nobody back then thought that one group should work to provide for another group. Why is this modern iteration of that thought any different?

The higher the portion of your income taken from you, the more a slave you are. You labor, others benefit. That is theft of labor, which is the DEFINITION of slavery.

Socialism is slavery, of one class to serve another. The class who are served are numerically larger, and their votes guarantee political power.