President Trump reportedly floated the idea of replacing half of the food stamps doled out to the program's 42.6 million recipients with food boxes.

The outcry from the program's recipients and their advocates was spectacular.

While such a move was just floated out there, probably to see how it would play with the public, and may be unlikely to happen due to higher costs, it teaches an important lesson: when the government pays, the government controls.  With so much of the bureaucratic class, the wealthier elements of the left, Millennials, and the underclass in awe of socialism, it's a rather important lesson to get across.

Socialism is all about having the government choose for you, because government knows best.  Ask any person who has had to live under communism, in hellholes such as Ceauﾈ册scu's Romania, East Germany, today's North Korea, and today's Cuba.  Socialism chooses the food you eat, the clothes you wear, the transport you take, the place you live, the health care you get, the technology you are allowed access to, and everything else, all for "your own good."

Having money – and food stamps are not money, but they are close – means that one can make one's own choices.  Socialists don't like people having money.  They scream at the idea of happy Americans having a garage full of expensive sports equipment and "no proper control."  They don't even want the poor to have choices – remember that in Venezuela, the government handed out rabbits and told the people that was their "two pounds of meat."  Many Americans have already felt this with the Nightmare of Obamacare already, but not food stamp recipients, whose health care is subsidized, if not utterly free.

Socialism makes pretty claims about being all about equality, but what it's really about is all the money in the government's hands and the government choosing everything for you, to make sure you don't make "bad" choices.  People become totally infantilized.  In the matter of food stamps (which in communist places are known as food ration cards), it's a choice that can be felt very personally and very directly, which may explain the sudden loud outcry.

As Ed Straker wrote in his discussion of the subject the other day here:

The startling thing about this entire discussion is that liberals are outraged that people on food stamps are being deprived of choice.  Liberals didn't care about depriving people of choice when it came to Obamacare, or gun control, or raising taxes.  They didn't care even when Michelle Obama, the cultural tsarina in charge of food tastes, tried to tell our kids what they should be eating in school.

Why such a different attitude when it comes to food stamps?

Let's face it: the poor, having little money, already have few choices.  To take away even food choices is pretty harsh.  Yet this is exactly what the much vaunted socialism does, and why people should not want to be dependent on the Pied Piper of government largesse, touted by Bernie Sanders and others.  Could that have been a "teachable moment" from President Trump's team about the reality of socialism?  Perhaps.  The food stamp proposal about distributing food instead should drive that point home.  For every food stamp recipient who abuses his food stamp free stuff (which is the rationale, just as "hoarders and wreckers" was the term used among the commies), there may be one who eats better than the canned products being offered, such as the woman with the fresh-vegetable diet featured in this report here, and who is therefore penalized.  Perhaps that woman, who knows how to make better choices for herself than the government can make for her, should get a clue and try to get off food stamps – and more to the point, embrace the freedom of capitalism.  She can't very well dictate the terms of her aid if it is to remain aid.

Beggars can't be choosers.  Socialism has always been all about making people beggars.