Textbooks at South High School in Bakersfield, California, taught that the few communist experiments in the early days of the United States did not last. Their failure was on the lack of incentive. Why do your share in cultivating the crops, or helping build the accommodations that clothed and housed members when you could eat the same food and sleep in the same housing by doing nothing. In a few decades, idealism became idleness for many. Communes failed.

Political communism has failed. In high school, we learned of American experiments with communism. They folded in decades. California high school history texts taught that lack of incentive was the cause. The Bible presents the same lesson, Consider Matt. 20: 2-15, which tells of a vineyard owner who hired laborers for what seems to have been a day’s wages at different times.