the problem with communism

If you care to stroll down memory lane:

There Oughta Be a Law!, or TOBAL!, was a single-panel newspaper comic strip, created by Harry Shorten and Al Fagaly, which was syndicated for four decades from 1944 to 1985.^[1] The gags illustrated minor absurdities, frustrations, hypocrisies, ironies and misfortunes of everyday life, displayed in a single-panel or two-panel format. There Oughta Be a Law! was highly derivative of Jimmy Hatlo's They'll Do It Every Time^[2] which had a long run over eight decades, from 1929 to 2008.

I remember it well.  To see some of the original toons you can go here:
 https://www.google.com/search?sxsrf=ALeKk03lfpNy9CkJRTjHBRZiKmL4hzVAyQ:1585306383698&q=there+ought+to+be+a+law+cartoon&tbm=isch&source=univ&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjI5vC-vrroAhVUkHIEHQXoCSIQsAR6BAgLEAE&biw=757&bih=716

I used to ponder revenge, from an evolutionary standpoint.  What function did it serve?  People have been known to go to great lengths and expend wealth and time just to get revenge, and whether they succeed or fail they are almost always worse off for the effort.  And you can feel it inside yourself.  Somebody does you some kind of wrong and you have to get even.  Often you will daydream elaborate scenarios of revenge, and for most of us, us sensible people, that is enough.  Revenge is a dish best served cold some say, but even better is not served at all.  Let it go, you will be better off for it.  Evolutionary biology maintains that if we examine our makeup everything about us can be explained as something that helps us survive, or else it would have been dropped long ago.

Altruism is a thing that has aided man greatly in conquering the world.  Sure we fight a lot, but we also cooperate a lot, do onto others as you would have others do onto you.  When  Timmy falls into a well, we will almost always go to great lengths to get him out even if he is a complete stranger.  Maybe some apes and some dolphins might do something similar, but not too much and not very often.

From each according to their ability, to each according to their need, who could argue with that?  The great hunter and his party bring back the mastodon and everybody feasts, and oh my look at Harry, he is certainly putting it away, which he does all the time and that's why he is so fat, why one can barely conceive of him crawling through the weeds on his belly to sneak up on the mastodon, and come to think of it, when is the last time anybody in the tribe can remember him doing that?  Never,  Never sounds about right.

Harry has figured something out.  Those mastodon hunts can get pretty dicey.  You could get killed, you could get maimed, you could at least get scarred.  Handsome Harry would not be so handsome with a big slash from his eye to his mouth and likely would not have been able to win the heart of Debbie with her grand child-bearing hips, which have borne many mouths to feed and many of them emulating their daddy so that every generation the hunting party gets smaller.  How much longer will this tribe survive?

And then along comes Al, and maybe it's a mutation or more likely a refinement of already existing genes.but he carries the gene for revenge.  While none of the other tribesmen are particularly piqued by Harry's behavior, it pisses Al off.  He calls Harry out, likely gives him a couple sharp blows to the head, and Harry either mends his ways or slinks off to starve.  What a man, everybody acclaims Angry Al, including Debbie of the broad hips.  The tribe prospers.

And that is a very simplified version of why communism looks good on paper, but in practice, not so hot.