Women on the fashionable talk show “The View” talk openly and admiringly of communism. Never before in our lifetimes have communist slogans and images been more in evidence on American streets.

And one American protester caught on camera held a sign proclaiming, “From Wisconsin to Libya, Workers of the World Unite — Fight for Communism.”

Really? We’re equating Wisconsin and Libya?

Maybe we need to get out more often?

We’d ask whether these people know what they’re saying, but the question would be purely rhetorical. They clearly do not.

Of all the forms of oppression mankind has dreamed up inside the dank walls of evil minds, communism may be the worst. At least with a dictatorship (think Saddam Hussein) you can lop off the head. In a communist regime, you’re fighting the Hydra.

Communism runs completely against the grain of nature and human nature. It stifles, and can extinguish, all of our inborn ambition and drive. When you notice that any extra effort gets you nowhere — because the core tenet of communism is “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need” — your natural desire to improve your lot is chopped off at the knees.

Pretty soon you notice that, while you’re killing yourself for nothing, others around you are all-too-happy to sit back and enjoy the fruits of your labor.

And because it forcibly redistributes those fruits to others without regard for either your labor or your neighbor’s sloth, your thrift or your neighbor’s wastefulness, it’s simply immoral. It’s robbery in the name of compassion.

What a sad perversion of compassion, too: It seeks to remove nature’s very needs and drives that inspire greatness in us. It prevents us from pushing ourselves to become our best selves.

The results are as evident as they’d be in a laboratory.

Ever see a satellite image of the Korean peninsula at night? South Korea is lit up like a Christmas tree. North Korea’s land mass is as dim as the country’s leadership. The reason? It’s not ethnicity or geography; they’re essentially the same people, separated solely by a thin line on the map.

No, the difference is their political systems. The North is imprisoned and isolated in a communist dictatorship. The South — thanks to the U.S. Armed Forces — is a capitalist, free-market, free society. And it shows.

This week marks the 25th

anniversary of the historic 1987 speech in Berlin by President Ronald Reagan in which he intoned to East Germany and its Soviet puppet master: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”

They did.

But what a statement that there had to be a wall in the first place. East Germany, as so many countries remain today, was a giant prison.

This is the “worker’s paradise” our union protester in Wisconsin wishes for herself and the rest of us?

Rest assured. Most Americans would die before allowing that.