The Left waffles on. Turning her Guardian anti-war editorial into an assault on global capitalism, Booker-prize winning author Arundhati Roy argues that "Soviet-style communism failed, not because it was intrinsically evil but because it was flawed. It allowed too few people to usurp too much power: 21st-century market-capitalism, American-style, will fail for the same reasons." And when capitalism falls, Roy implies, a new and better socialism will rise to take its place. ("Flawed" Soviet-style socialism, you see, was really just capitalism under another guise. Therefore we can blame capitalism for socialism's failings. Clever logic, no?) But let's look at the historical record: During the twentieth century, socialist and communist governments, Soviet-style and otherwise, executed over 120 million of their own people and denied so many essential liberties to so many millions more that they had to build walls around their countries to keep people in. Despite the historical record, however, the Left seems unable to accept that its most idealistic, most utopian, and most cherished values inevitably become the driving engines of despotic totalitarianism. As Friedrich Hayek pointed out more than fifty years ago, "From the saintly and single-minded idealist to the fanatic is often but a step."