Communism and Chocolate....

Recently in history class, we did a fun activity. The teacher handed out two pieces of candy to everyone in the classroom. Except for two people: they got eight pieces. We were then told to play rock, paper, scissors for the candy. If you lost you had to give the piece to the winner. I played, and was out of candy within my first three games. Once I was out of candy had to sit down and watch the rest of the class play. While I was watching I noticed a couple of things: it was easier for the 'rich' people to keep their candy, only one person who started out with two candies had more than that, and people were teaming up. They were 'investing' in each other. This game was very frustrating because there was a lot of luck involved. Or in my case, there was just a tendency to guess what the other person was thinking wrong. It was also really frustrating because the rich people always had candy! They couldn't have gotten rid of it if they tried (which they didn't), but still. It was pretty ridiculous. After a while, the teacher intervened and collected everyone's candy. Then she redistributed them all back evenly so that no one had more than anyone else.
The whole point of this activity was not so that was could have a couple of friendly games or rock, paper, scissors, but so that we could learn about communism, capitalism, socialism, and Karl Marx. We were just recreating it with candy. We started with capitalism: there were varying amounts of candy for everyone in the class and there was the freedom of competition. Then the teacher collected all of the candy and handed them back out equally to everyone. This represented socialism, where the government controlled everything. Communism is where no one had more than anyone else and everyone contributed to the overall wealth.  The rich people were not happy about this because it meant that they would have less money. There was a classless society created and everyone agreed to share.
The idea of capitalism, socialism, and communism was Karl Marx's he wanted to help the poor by giving them the same amount of money as rich people.Sadly, this idea does not work as well in practice as it sounds. Governments have to force their people to share the wealth. However, Karl Marx was not the only person with an idea on how to make poor people richer. Adam Smith came up with the idea of the Invisible Hand: a system in which the government didn't control the trade. This idea meant that people would look for high quality goods for the lowest prices. It would make it so that poor people would be more likely to afford them and businesses that mistreated their workers would not prosper.
Personally, I think that the Invisible Hand is a better theory because no one has to give up their money, and the businesses become better quality. Also, the poor people would be able to more easily afford the businesses' items. This would make everyone happy: the rich people get to keep their money and the poor people can afford more things. The only problem is that the poor people don't have more money and the rich people are till rich; goods are just made affordable. This system is better then communism because there would be less revolting and more cooperation.