But if you want it to be about taxes, that's just fine. Ask about that next time.

Second, Communism is based on Marx, not on America. If Marx was writing about anywhere, he was writing about France, Brussels (where he lived), and Britain. He certainly was not writing about the United States, which at the time he was writing Capital was fighting a Civil War over slavery and the nature of a federal republic. He had finished writing The Communist Manifesto just as the revolutions of 1848 swept across Europe. Europe was his focus. America was not even in the picture.

The first Communist nation-state (not counting the Paris Commune of 1871) was the USSR, established in 1917, when the United States had just emerged as a player on the world stage. The idea that Communism was established to imitate the US is laughable.

Sure, it's fun to talk about Marxism. If it weren't, conservatives wouldn't bring it up at the drop of a hat. It's a philosophy, a group of ideas. If you think there's something so dangerous it can't even be talked about, well, I feel sorry for you.

You have confused the Populist Party's "free silver" economic movement of the late 19th century (cf. William Jennings Bryan) with the Progressive social reform movement of the early 20th. If you will look them up, you will understand the difference. The examples that I gave were accurate; I did not include the eugenics initiative taken by some Progressives of that era. ("Three generations of imbeciles are enough." -Justice Oliver Wendel Holmes.) As I mentioned, not all of their aims were praiseworthy, but some of them were. Women's suffrage is one of them.

The Progressives saw the income tax, which had been an on-again-off-again thing since it was first levied during the Civil War, as a curb on what they saw as irresponsible wealth, as exemplified by the "robber barons" of the Gilded Era. The income tax was eventually levied as a result of the 16th Amendment, because the income tax of 1894 was ruled unconstitutional, and the only way around that was to amend the Constitution.

Re: your long "explanation" about fairness in the workplace: We wouldn't even have to have OSHA if people weren't exposed to undue hazards in the workplace so that industry could make a profit. People's pensions, which were part of their contracts, are being pulled out from under them. That wonder of the marketplace, Walmart, is a very big offender when it comes to letting the state cover their employees' medical care. Other companies' employees are in the same boat. Tell me again how people should just work harder. Better yet, tell that to someone who has to work two jobs to keep body and soul together. Then tell me how collecting dividends off of the product of those people's labor is hard work. Please.

There already are anarcho-syndicalist businesses in the world, running at a profit by and for the people who work there. Some are located in Western Europe. A concentration of them can be found in Argentina, where, when workers were laid off and companies went "out of business", the workers took over the factories and began running them by committee. The most famous one is the Zanon Ceramics Factory. It's still running, and running well, (I found a recent article I struggled through in Spanish), but now the Argentine rightists, who make you guys look like the liberal caucus, have taken to threatening the employees and beating them up.

So, you see, no one has to invent this. And it works! People are not getting rich, but they are turning a profit, benefitting their community, working in a safer place, and providing for their families. They are not getting rich, but they are accumulating wealth of another kind. They are doing this so well that those who don't like it are beating them up.