Louise Linton Is a Walking Ad for Communism

I was a child of the Cold War. I grew up being taught to fear the commies. They wanted to take away all my rights, make us slaves, send us to camps, nuke the planet. You know, standard scare-the-crap-out-of-a-7-year-old-with-existential-dread.

Of course, as the Cold War thawed and eventually ended because Rocky beat Ivan Drago and gave a speech, commies weren't so scary anymore. Sure, their ideology was still bad, their economic philosophy was stupid, and they would never rule the world, but they weren't scary.

I still don't find them frightening anymore. I mean, basically what's left of the commies is China, which is just a bunch of capitalist oligarchs; Cuba, which has become a hipster tourist destination; and North Korea, which is only kinda communist and mostly just good for the occasional nuclear annihilation nostalgia. In America, communism is pretty much the domain of millennials who'll lose interest after their first good job and the hard-core types who spend most of their time holding meetings about planning meetings to hold a rally if they can get off work. For the most part, communism is dead. Oh, I forgot Vietnam is still communist, but we're friends with them, so it doesn't count.

But sometimes, sometimes I remember why communism existed in the first place. Earlier this week, Louise Linton, the wife of Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, gave a good example for why Russia isn't a monarchy anymore. She posted on her Instagram a picture of herself striding off a government jet with her husband after visiting the Scrooge McDuck vault of gold at Fort Knox, and tagged all of her expensive clothes.

Look, I get that she's rich, I mean her parents own a freaking castle in Scotland and she's married to a former Goldman Sachs guy; she's not hurting. You shouldn't begrudge people's wealth; it's one of the Ten Commandments for a reason. People just get lucky by birth or work or simply picking the right numbers and end up stinking rich, but it doesn't make them a bad person. Look at the group The Giving Pledge -- 158 billionaires who collectively donated $365 billion to charities. Nicki Minaj, who's worth about $70 million, just randomly decided to start paying off people's student loans one day on Twitter. Makes me regret not following her. There's nothing wrong with making money. There is a problem with it turning you into a jackass.

Of course, when Linton posted the photo along with the list of her designer clothes, people began to call her out. When the Secret Service is out of money because it has to guard Trump's daughter during a spending spree and pay Trump to use the golf carts at the golf courses he lives at, it's really beyond the pale that Linton steps off a government jet tagging Valentino shoes, Mouret pants, and a freaking scarf that costs at least $200 (seriously, I Googled all the things she tagged). Her entire outfit, including the purse, is two-thirds of what I make in a year. The shoes alone are just about my take-home pay in a month. But $200 or more scarf?! It's a square of fabric. I've been to the fabric store; I can get two yards of silk for like 20 bucks. "Oh, but it's designer!" So fucking what? I get spending a few million on a Picasso, but two bills for a fancy napkin you wrap around your throat?

When people called Linton out, she went on a big tirade about how much money they pay in taxes, talking about how much they have sacrificed for the country, and told a commenter her "life looks cute." Look, lady, unless you got no legs and PTSD from an IED in Anbar Province, you don't get to compare paying taxes to sacrificing your body for the country. Hell, Peace Corps members sacrifice more, social workers who are on welfare sacrifice more, freaking fire jumpers out in Yellowstone sacrifice more than you having to pony up some cash.

Then she had the audacity to say her critics were out of touch. Seriously. I know people who prostitute to pay back student loans. Hell, I know some who do it just to pay the rent. So when you live with a guy whose goal is to cut taxes on the 1 percent and corporations for a president who is billing the U.S. government to babysit him while he shitposts on Twitter from the 11^th hole, bragging about your stupid sunglasses kind of pisses us off when a lot of us have seriously thought, You know, I could probably rob this place and not get caught, when standing in line at the 7-Eleven using change to put gas in the car.

I have a pithy saying, "The best argument for communism is capitalism and vice versa." I'm cool with European-style socialism; corporations make the goods and give you jobs while the government taxes them and pays for your school and health care, and will feed you and put a roof over your head if necessary.

Capitalism is cool because if you're clever enough and lucky enough, you can be fugly as sin and still get laid regularly. Communism sucks, though, because it's an authoritarian regime that crushes dissent, can't run a national economy, and makes shitty cars. Capitalism can be hell too. Just go back and read about the Gilded Age. You think it's bad now, but corporations basically hired out the National Guard to shoot union workers, for God's sake, back then. Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, a novel about the horrific conditions in the meatpacking industry at the turn of the century, wasn't that embellished. I mean, unregulated capitalism and its associated robber barons and plutocrats corrupting the government nearly tore the country apart at the turn of the last century. Anarchists were setting off bombs on Wall Street for a reason back then.

At a time when our country's government is becoming more and more beholden to special interests and lobbyists; when corporations are putting quarterly profits above the environment, and executives get multimillion-dollar severance packages for driving a company into the dirt while their workers can't afford to go to the doctor; when people have to take on a lifetime of crippling debt just to get an education so they can rise above poverty wages -- I mean, c'mon. Do these folks just not get it? People don't believe in the American Dream anymore; they don't buy the "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" shtick anymore. They're anxious, they're desperate, they're hopeless, and they're getting angry.

For a D-list actress married to a Wall Street banker who's working for a guy who is basically a grifter and store-brand mobster to tell average Americans to get over her flaunting her wealth so flippantly while using government resources paid with their tax dollars? Well, all I can say to that is, "Workers of the World Unite..."

AMANDA KERRI is a writer and comedian based in Oklahoma City. Follow her on Twitter @Amanda_Kerri.