I'm trying to understand why all my friends and coworkers are socialists.

Not socialists in practice, of course. After all, they don't personally redistribute their own wealth for sake of numerical financial equality. Sure, sometimes they'll give a buck to the homeless or buy a "fair trade" bag of coffee beans... but that's only after they've made sure to pay their rent, buy their groceries, and pre-order the next PS3 game. In their day-to-day lives, they understand that their employers pay them for their labor and they'd happily go work for more money or less responsibility if the opportunity came along; they understand that their barbers and shopkeepers charge them as much as they can and they'd happily go shop somewhere else if they could get a lower price for comparable goods and services. In actual practice, everybody I know lives and breathes capitalism, and wouldn't really know how it could possibly be otherwise.

But they're socialists in the abstract. My friends, in general, are highly intellectual (and most are even intelligent). Most of them work in an engineering- or technology-related discipline that involves arranging intricate components into elaborate complex mechanisms, a task that takes a combination of brains, creativity, and extensive training. In fact, this process applies equally to my friends in the arts, literature, and journalism professions - whether your "components" are transistors, STL functions, paint colors, notes on a clef, or words in the English language, the process of creation is the same. Maybe they believe an economy should be like a circuitboard or a painting - something that needs a Creator, or at least an Intelligent Designer. While most of them scoff at creationism, the thought of letting Darwinian selection guide a $40T economy makes them feel uncomfortable.

I wish I could understand why.

It can't be a matter of intelligence per se, because most of my friends are extremely smart and yet the principles of socialism are so blatantly, self-evidently stupid. I suppose it could be a mis-application of intelligence - the kind of cognitive error that makes a particle physicist think he can perform open-heart surgery because really a living organic system is nothing but a big collection of subatomic components. And he knows all about quarks, so a triple bypass should be no big deal - after all, he understands the structure of arteries and cardiac muscles on a much deeper level than the surgeon, right? It's not that he necessarily thinks a surgeon is dumber than him, it's just that he views everything through the lens of his own expertise.

Personally, though? I believe it's lust.

I think my friends - nay, the country - see Socialism as the trashy slut in third-period English that they feel disturbingly drawn to. They see her there every single day, sitting at her desk with her razor-burned legs crossed, her flabby thighs displayed prominently under her dark blue pleated plaid skirt. Her pimpled cheeks expand and contract as she sucks on a Blow-Pop with her pierced tongue and her excessively ChapStik'ed lips. Her stringy hair is done up in loose pigtails, probably still riddled with crusty droplets from her previous night's date. She wears T-shirts that say "Plays Well With Others" and her checkerboard denim purse has buttons on it saying "You know you want it". You hate yourself for having to admit it's true.

Everybody's had a piece of her - the Russians, the Chinese, the Cubans, the Koreans. She's "dating" some Eurotrash guys right now, and occasionally banging the English dude even though he really should know better. Most boys she's been with quickly end up feeling a burning sensation when they pee. A few of the particularly stupid ones fell in love with her, and they've never quite been the same since. The Russian guy had a really serious thing going with her once - by most accounts, he was her first - but that relationship got very, very ugly and now the two of them won't even talk to each other. The Russian guy's still a little messed up - for example, he's got some serious boundary issues - but he seems much more together now. He's always been a little messed up anyway. As for her, well, she's as big a whore as ever. Maybe she's just trying to punish her former Russkie lover by slathering her parasite-laden cooch-juice on every boy she can find, but she's only hurting herself... and her willing victims.

You know the old mindgame where someone tells you, "Don't think of a white bear"? You can't not think of a white bear, because you have to process the sentence to know what it is you're not supposed to do.

It's the same thing with Socialism. Every time you see her, you can't not think about taking her back out into the alley behind the school and slamming her up against the dumpster. You try to force yourself to not visualize her stuffing your cock down her throat until her eyes tear up and her sloppy mascara runs down her ruddy cheeks. You try, but you can't. You hate yourself for it, but the fact is you just want to plow that dirty, nasty little slut from every possible angle. To just do her already. Get her out of your system, get her out of your head.

And in the back of your mind, you think maybe she's not so bad after all. Maybe she's got a heart of gold. Maybe she's a really sweet, wonderful girl underneath that slimy exterior. Maybe all the stories about her are wrong - or maybe you're the man that will finally tame her. Sure, the Korean kid now sits alone in his room every night writing poems to her... but that's 'cuz he's the Korean kid. Maybe with you, if you're strong enough, things will come up roses, and you and she will create something beautiful together. Here she is, having been with every guy in the school (and a couple from the nearby community college), and who's the one she chooses to be with when all is said and done? You. Wouldn't that be something?

So what do they do? They flirt.

They flirt with Socialism. They flirt with the idea of socialized health care and federal housing management. They implement progressive taxation schemes and federal grant programs. They know in the back of their minds that no good will come of it, that the wanting is more compelling than the having. And they believe that, once they've gotten a taste of her, they'll be okay afterwards - at worst they won't catch anything they can't fix with penicillin. And maybe, just maybe, it can blossom into a romance. It's a gamble, one that they feel themselves destined to take, not because it's necessarily a good idea, but because it's an idea at all, and it's stuck in their heads and they'll never be rid of it until they finally just do it.

And so they pursue Socialism as though they are pursuing their destiny. They rally with irrational (and frankly creepy) fervor behind politicians like Hillary Clinton and Barak Obama, who promise to set them up with her... as though that's a good thing. And they flirt with her every chance they get.

They flirt with disaster.