Fredric Bastiat on socialism, in What is Seen, circa 1848:

The more one examines these "forward-looking" schools of thought, the more one is convinced that at bottom they rest on nothing but ignorance proclaiming itself infallible and demanding despotic power in the name of this infallibility.

Bingo.

Elsewhere, after having shown the harm caused by the socialist scheme of replacing private enterprise with considerably more wasteful state enterprises, he remarks, in obvious frustration:

The socialists who have invented these follies, and who in days of distress plant them in the minds of the masses, generously confer on themselves the title of "forward-looking" men, and there is a real danger that usage, that tyrant of language, will ratify both the word and the judgment it implies. "Forward-looking" assumes that these gentlemen can see ahead much further than ordinary people; that their only fault is to be too much in advance of their century; and that, if the time has not yet arrived when certain private services, allegedly parasitical, can be eliminated, the fault is with the public, which is far behind socialism. To my mind and knowledge, it is the contrary that is true, and I do not know to what barbaric century we should have to return to find on this point a level of understanding comparable to that of the socialists.

I'm grateful I figured all this out on my own before discovering Bastiat. Might have been more efficient the other way, but I think I am more passionate for having worked to discover the truth myself.