If ‘economics tell us’ that our present army of workers, working half time, will be able, under Socialism, to earn twelve and a half times as much as at present — well, then, it is high time to demand proofs. My personal view is that no such proofs exist. The whole idea, in a word, is sheer nonsense. There is no more ground for it, in the actual facts of existence, than for the doctrine that, if I had brown eyes instead of blue, I would be a Methodist bishop at $8,000 a year.
H. L. Mencken, in Robert Rives La Monte and Mencken, Men versus The Man (1910).