Exercising your critical thinking:

What are the appeals or strengths of this idea?

     Strengths are: everyone is treated/payed the same, and everyone works for the government.  The citizens that need help the most will recieve it.  Essentialy it is supposed to make the government stronger.

What works against this idea?

     A corrupt government will ruin this idea, and the citizens will have to suffer.  This will cause them to rebel and this could lead to the failer of this type of government.

Basing everything off of religion caused Marxism to fail.

What traces of this idea can we identify in 21^st century  US life? [This is where John Rawls' work is relevant]

    Other countries had tried to follow the Marxist rule; however, this ended up causing the country to fail.  After realizing that Marxism was failing, Vladimir Lenin created his new idea of rule and used it on Russia.  Eventually this idea progressed and became what is known today as communism.  Countries such as Russia tried to spread the idea of communism to other countries that were having political struggles.  The U.S. did not like this idea and tried to stop the spread; however, there were some countries that they could not stop from becoming communist.

Marx and Engels Communist Manifesto Description