Vocabular Economistics

This story came up in my Facebook newsfeed today.  It's a parable involving an economics professor at a local college who has a disagreement with his student's belief that Obama's socialism can equalize America. He decided to conduct an experiment in the class to illustrate "Obama's plan." No evidence is given that such a plan exists; I suppose we are just to assume that it does for the sake of the story.
    His proposal was that all grades in the class would be averaged, and everyone would receive the same grade.  The results were that at the beginning the grades were fairly high, but they got progressively worse and worse as incentive was reduced.  No one was happy with the outcome.  And the moral of the story is that "socialism would also ultimately fail because when the reward is great, the effort to succeed is great, but when government takes all the reward away, no one will try or want to succeed." 
This is followed by five overly obvious statements that are supposed to be the lessons you should learn from the story, which inspire the educated reader to respond with, "Yeah.  And?"  There's no explanation given as to why this pertains to any of the President's policies, or the policies of anyone in government, at all, or that it has anything to do with current events.  I suppose we're just to assume relevancy for the sake of the story.
    But the biggest problem with the story is simply this: The experiment does not illustrate socialism.  The experiment illustrates communism, which is an entirely different animal.  This is something that any economics professor should know.  So why didn't this one?  I'm guessing it's because the author didn't know much about economics himself.  (Apparently, he doesn't know much about governmental policy, either.  I'm guessing the assumptions above have something to do with identity politics and epistemic closure.)
   If the professor wanted to illustrate socialism using grades, a better way would have been to point out that when they were younger they received their grades through an agent of the state (a teacher), who worked for a government agency (the public school system), which was paid for by the community using taxpayer funds.
   Now, notice that one does not preclude the other.  The teacher could still average the grades while being paid with taxpayer funds, so it is possible to be communist and socialist at the same time.  It's also important to note that there are several different kinds of socialism.  The one I wrote about above is called Democratic Socialism (the taxpayers have a say in how things are done), and it's a normal part of our American culture, coexisting with our capitalistic economy.  But one has to assume that the author of the story has Marxist Socialism in mind.  Paul Krugman gives a pretty good explanation of why Marxist Socialism doesn't work in his book "The Conscience of a Liberal".
    I could go on.  The story shows a fundamental misunderstanding of liberalism, income redistribution, welfare, etc.  At the bottom, you can click on a link to a previous posting, at the end of which are the "outraged comments" from "the left."  There were actually more comments from those who supported the message of the story than not, and few on either side made much sense in real life.  I also noted that "the left" is spoken of as a unified force, equal and opposite to "the right."  If I kept writing, this would eventually turn into a book, and I'm just not ready for that.