Hello, I would like to sya that I love your Book Jennifer Government and NationStates. I started playing it maybe a month ago, and I’m doing pretty well. But I have made a mistake with one of my issues and now I have Socialism. So my question is. Do you have any advice for me on how I can fix it? Thanks for your time. Have a great day!

A Guy named Oliver

This is a common problem. Often you’re happily going about with a free market and individual rights and then someone’s like, “Should we maybe do something about how poor kids are getting a worse education, thus entrenching disadvantage across generations?” and, whoops, socialism.

The important thing is not to panic. Just because you have socialism, that doesn’t mean you’ll always have socialism. There is a cure. However, socialism is a very serious condition, and I’d advise you to avoid contact with other countries so they don’t catch it from you.

This can happen more easily than you think: There are a lot of transmission vectors, such as citizens of your country posting online about how they were taken to the emergency room and yet their financial lives have not been reduced to a smoking ruin, and if citizens of other countries hear this and believe it, that country can get socialism, too.

It’s also important to remember that any amount of socialism is dangerous. You can’t be half-pregnant with socialism. You either have it or you don’t. The only solution is to completely flush it out of your system. There’s no point in curing socialism in one area only for it to fester somewhere else. And you may be surprised by the places socialism can develop, if left untreated; for example, do you have a public fire service? A lot of countries do and don’t realize it. Unless your fire service is charging market rates and refusing service to non-paying customers, then unfortunately, you still have socialism.

Similarly, you may have a lot of public roads and parks, left over from a time when people didn’t fully understand the risks of socialism: You need to hand these over to fee-charging corporations as quickly as possible. Schools, clinics, and public transportation, obviously. Get rid of those. Welfare. Pensions. Also, and I know you don’t want to hear this, but the military. If your national defense is funded by forcibly taxing your citizens, you probably have socialism. This can be hard to see directly, so keep an eye out for signs of parasites, such as a wider network of supposedly-private defense contractors guzzling down those tax dollars.

The good news, though, is that with sufficient dedication, you can be cured! In time, you can become completely socialism-free, and enjoy a Utopian libertarian existence with no welfare, taxation, or empathy of any kind. Good luck.