Ambrose Bierce about socialists - written in 1910

Ambrose Bierce wrote "The Socialist-What he is, and why" in 2010. He wrote this before the birth of the Soviet Union but got close to the real thing. 

Some excerpts follow.  

It looks as if we may eventually have to prevent the multiplication of millionaires by setting a legal limit to private fortunes.

American socialism is not a political doctrine; it is a state of mind. A man is an active socialist because he is afflicted with congenital insurgency: he was born a rebel. He rebels, not only against ‘the established order’ in government, but against pretty nearly everything that takes his attention and enlists his thought. 

His unreason is what he is a socialist with. That, too, is the cause of his inefficiency in the competitions of life, 

Anarchism says: 'Ye shall have no law'; socialism: 'Law is all that ye shall have.' 

The socialist notion appears to be that the world’s wealth is a fixed quantity, and A can acquire only by depriving B. He is fond of figuring the rich as living upon the poor—riding on their backs, as Tolstoi (staggering under the weight of his wife, to whom he had given his vast estate) was pleased to signify the situation. The plain truth of the matter is that the poor live mostly on the rich—entirely unless with their own hands they dig a bare subsistence out of their own farms or gravel claims; if they do better than that they are not poor.  

We have so good a country here that more than a million a year of Europe’s poor come over to share its advantages. In the patent fact that it is a land of opportunity and prosperity we feel a justifiable pride; yet the crowning proof and natural result of this—the great number that do prosper—'the multitude of millionaires'—has come to be resented as an intolerable wrong,

Another thing that these worthies have in common—and in common with many unassorted sentimentaliters and effemininnies in this age of unreason—is sympathy with crime. No avowed socialist but advocates a rosewater penology that coddles the felon who has broken into prison to enjoy a life of peace and plenty; none but would expel the warden and flog the turnkey. All are proponents of the holy homily; all deny that punishment deters from crime, 

That there are honest, clean-minded patriotic socialists goes without saying. They are theorists and dreamers with a knowledge of life and affairs a little profounder than that of a horse but not quite so profound as that of a cow. But the 'movement' as a social and political force is, in this country, born of envy, the true purpose of its activities, revenge. In the shadow of our national prosperity it whets its knife for the throats of the prosperous. It unleashes the hounds of hate upon the track of success—the only kind of success that it covets and derides.

The controversial journalist also wrote about novelists and literary critics. Fiery prose.