Maybe Anabaptists Aren't Always As Portrayed

 https://x.com/handre/status/2052295198990799040?s=51&t=cLq01Oy84YkmYPZ-URIMYw

 https://exhibitions.lib.cam.ac.uk/reformation/artifacts/the-anabaptist-kingdom-of-munster/

 "The Anabaptist Kingdom of Münster stands as history's most vivid demonstration that collectivism breeds tyranny and starvation centuries before Marx penned a single word about class struggle. In 1534, radical Anabaptist preachers seized control of this German city and immediately declared their "New Jerusalem" built on complete communal ownership. Private property vanished overnight. The new regime confiscated all money and demanded citizens pool every resource for the collective good. Sound familiar? The self-proclaimed "Tailor-King" Jan van Leiden ruled this proto-socialist paradise with absolute authority, enforcing his vision of equality through systematic terror. Dissenters faced immediate execution. The state mandated polygamy as official policy while abolishing individual economic choice entirely. When you destroy price signals and property rights, you destroy the coordination mechanism that feeds cities. Münster's collectivist experiment delivered exactly what economic theory predicts: rapid collapse into famine and chaos. Within months, residents ate rats and boiled leather to survive. Reports of cannibalism emerged as the egalitarian dream transformed into a living nightmare. The most predictable element? Elite hypocrisy. While ordinary citizens starved in their enforced equality, van Leiden and his inner circle lived in luxury, enjoying the finest food and accommodations the collective could provide. Centralized power inevitably corrupts those who wield it. The economic logic remains bulletproof: without private property, individuals lose incentive to produce efficiently. Without market prices, planners cannot calculate resource allocation. Without voluntary exchange, coercion becomes the only tool for organizing complex society. Münster's rulers discovered these iron laws the hard way. The starving city collapsed from within as its communist economy proved incapable of sustaining basic human life. When Catholic armies finally retook Münster in 1535, they found a wasteland of economic destruction and human misery. The victors tortured the surviving Anabaptist leaders and displayed their bodies in iron cages hung from the city's main church. Those cages remained there for centuries as a warning about utopian schemes that promise equality but deliver only death. Modern advocates of wealth redistribution and collective ownership prefer to ignore Münster's lessons. They insist their version of centralized control will somehow escape the economic laws that doomed every previous attempt. But human nature and market forces operate independently of ideological wishes. The Anabaptist experiment reveals the fatal flaw in all collectivist thinking: the assumption that abolishing property rights creates abundance rather than scarcity. In reality, property rights exist because they solve the fundamental problem of resource allocation in a world of competing needs and limited goods. Münster's collapse took just sixteen months to complete. The city's descent from Protestant reform to communist tyranny to economic wasteland offers a perfect case study in how quickly good intentions can destroy functioning societies when they ignore basic economic principles. You can find those iron cages in Münster today, still hanging from St. Lambert's Church after nearly five centuries. They serve as permanent reminders that collectivism's promises always end the same way: in starvation, tyranny, and death."