I’d like to reminisce on my childhood, more specifically, elementary school. I’m not sure why, but being able to eat food in class was a big deal. Most teachers didn’t let kids eat in class for perfectly understandable reasons. You had to wait until recess to eat your snack (if you were lucky enough to have one) and wait for lunch to eat your lunch. But for some reason, eating in the actual classroom was always alluring.

Then one day, my friend Matt decided to do what we all thought was impossible. He had a cheese and crackers packet leftover from lunch, and as luck would have it, we were watching a movie toward the end of the day. The room was dark while the movie played. He slowly reached into his backpack and pulled out his cheese and crackers. He gently lifted the plastic seal, all the while his eyes fixed on our teacher. It probably didn’t help his cause that all of us seated around him were staring at him during this bold endeavor, but before he was able to sneak the red spreading stick into the cheese, the lights flicked on.

BUSTED.

Our teacher stood up from her desk and said, “Matthew!” He was a goner. We all figured he’d be spending the next several recesses standing on the line rather than playing kickball with us. Nice knowing you, Matt.

But to our surprise, our teacher didn’t demand he put it away. No, instead, she made a simple statement that would alter my understanding of humanity.

“If you want to eat those in class, you’d better have enough to share with everyone.”

Matt looked down at his snack. There were only 5 crackers and a limited amount of spreadable cheese.

“If you can’t share, I’m going to take it away,” the teacher said.

There were 20 of us in the classroom. He couldn’t possibly divide the contents equally and still have enough to enjoy for himself. So he didn’t. He slumped down in his seat and closed the crackers. The great experiment was over.

This was my earliest lesson in socialism.

And it was a punishment. I would have loved to snack on cheese and crackers in class, but I couldn’t bring them in for everyone, so I just never did. And I feel like that’s a lesson in and of itself. The idea of “if there isn’t enough for everybody, then nobody can have it” IS socialism.

It then seems quite revealing how we effectively use socialism as a punishment. And the reason we do it is that we know the effect of forcing someone to live for the sake of others.