Control is never immediate.  Step by step it’s expanded.  They’ll never impose the full weight of their desire at once—there would be revolt.  Instead, it’s a slow tightening.  A pressure valve that only turns in one direction.  It must creep forward to avoid awakening resistance.  This is how the machinery of control works.  It’s dressed in different clothes, but its essence hasn’t changed.  A modern inquisition, complete with priests of power, cloaked not in robes but in suits.

Everyone knows the state doesn’t create abundance.  Even its loyal thinkers admit this in quiet moments.  To cover the contradiction, they invent absurd tales—that state control brings happiness.  Happiness, they say, is measurable.  Yet happiness is subjective, shifting from one person to the next, across time and circumstance.  To say coercion produces happiness is as laughable as saying shackles create freedom.  The statist myth requires people to deny their own lived experience—poverty dressed as plenty, oppression renamed security.

When domestic coercion grows stale, it bursts outward.  The violence becomes foreign policy.  Statism can’t rest within its borders.  It must extend beyond them.  Promises of peace disguise preparations for war.  Promises of prosperity disguise new forms of plunder.  Statism dresses as protector, healer, or guide—but beneath the costume it is a religion.  It worships power, demands obedience, and denies rivals.  Its doctrine is violence, its gospel is submission.  Favors are reserved for believers, punishment for heretics.

Ownership under statism is counterfeit.  What it holds was taken by force.  Its wealth is proportional to its plunder.  The greater its reach, the weaker the division of labor.  Civilization itself unravels.  The market builds, the state destroys.  Capitalism is choice.  Statism is coercion.  Wars are born of the latter, not the former.  Conflict in markets is about ownership, not annihilation.  Voluntary exchange produces wealth.  Coerced exchange produces waste, misery, and ruin.

The results are appalling.  Minds dulled by propaganda can no longer weigh ideas.  Education is hollow, designed to breed compliance, not independence.  The lie is sold again and again: violence against you will make you happier.  The people, unwittingly, give consent.  They endure the lash, worship the lash-holder, and call him savior.  They have been trained to see chains as comfort, submission as virtue, and obedience as freedom.  Statism is their religion, and they kneel to it willingly.

Reference

Ludwig von Mises; Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis