As the late, great William F. Buckley once noted, communism is the greatest curse mankind has ever known.  Now a study confirms it.

According to the New York Post, reprinting an item that ran in the Sun of the U.K.:

Living under communism makes countries poorer and less healthy for decades, according to a landmark new study.

Researchers testing historical connections between cultures found that whether a country had been under communism was the biggest factor for those with lower health, income and educational levels.

In the first undertaking of its kind, they analyzed the fortunes of 44 countries across Europe and Asia and looked at geography, religion, systems of government and a more intangible quality called "deep cultural ancestry."

Obviously, communism not only kills like a disease while it's in operation, but continues to kill after it's eventually shaken off.  And no nation not afflicted with it suffers the same lingering side-effects – only the nations that have endured it do.  It's like a debilitating disease that ravages so badly that its effects never go away.

The left has yet to come to terms with communism and the lingering terrible after-effects of communism once it's shaken off.

It's really amazing as a study result.  The broad pattern of world development has been of countries generally getting richer and richer, but there is one exception: countries that have had exposure to communism.

One reason, and it's an important one, is, as Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit.com accurately observes, communism's breakdown of human trust.  As the state takes all power and neighbor spies on neighbor in the service of the state, the mitochondria that hold the society together – trust in one's neighbor, in one's street safety, or the guy you are buying arugula from – fall apart, affecting the whole society, leaving only weakness.  Any questions as to why Aleksander I. Solzhenitsyn compares communism to cancer?

He also called it anti-human, and the results of this study, conducted by three scholars publishing in the tony Royal Society Open Science, support that.

And yet, incredibly, Millennials with no memory of communism and what it does to people, indoctrinated by rabid leftists in schools, hold this enfeebling political system in high regard.  Politicians such as socialist Bernie Sanders promote it, calling the state a panacea, completely failing to read history and admit the truth.  Sanders should have repudiated communism long ago, well before he took his honeymoon in Soviet Moscow and praised the Castroites of Cuba and the Chavistas of Venezuela.  But he hasn't.  A virus remains, still quite possible to pick up and debilitate like cancer or Ebola, with permanent horrible results no one talks about.