The American Spectator

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For noncompliance with Mugabe's edict, business owners are threatened with jail and the nationalization of their companies. "We are at war," explained one of Mugabe's vice presidents, Joseph Msika. "We will not allow shelves to be empty."

In other words, if supplies won't come forth voluntarily via the market, the government will force the production.

"As many as 4,000 businesspeople have been arrested, fined or jailed," reported Wines, while "state-run newspapers publish lists of telephone numbers on their front pages daily, exhorting citizens to report merchants whose prices exceed the dictates."

In the Soviet Union, to keep things moving according to plan, the government eventually killed 55 million of its own citizens. In China, 36 million.

To kill in those numbers required the obedience of many. Said British philosopher W.K. Clifford, "There is one thing more wicked in the world than the desire to command, and that is the will to obey."

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Economics, Business, Law, Socialism