Woman who fled a communist country fears for America's future if socialism prevails
Monalisa Foster didn’t know bananas were supposed to be yellow. The bananas she ate were green.It wasn’t her fault. She grew up in Nicolae Ceaușescu’s communist Romania, where food was scarce and people waited in line for rations. Now, especially with the presidential election coming up, Monalisa worries that the U.S. could be headed down the same path with socialism.She writes a story based on her childhood in the short story Pretending to Sleep. She’s seen and heard things in America that remind her of her childhood in a communist country. And she’s terrified.People who root for Bernie Sanders’ socialism think it’s “the kind of socialism that comes out of your dorm room bong where you sit around stoned thinking that somehow, magically, human nature is going to change and all of a sudden people are going to just give you stuff because you want it.”What they really want is called theft. “They think that socialism is what private charity is. It’s radically different because it’s one thing when I reach into my own pocket to make the world better. It’s quite another when I reach into somebody else’s.” It isn’t just taking care of everybody and having good feelings.There’s no such thing as a free lunch. “Free food means that somebody has to provide it. So now I’ve made a slave out of the farmer and the trucker and the butcher,” Monalisa says. “And free healthcare has made slaves out of the doctors and nurses and the people that make your medicine. Free education says you’ve made slaves out of the teachers. So every time you put free this or free that you are actually taking away somebody else’s freedom because nothing is free.”