Just before 7 p.m. on Halloween, Donald Trump Jr. posted a tweet of his daughter tilting her orange bucket of candy toward the camera, and staring up forlornly at the photographer. Appended to the darling photo was a lesson, or an attempt at a lesson, by the father:

I’m going to take half of Chloe’s candy tonight & give it to some kid who sat at home. It’s never to early to teach her about socialism. pic.twitter.com/3ie9C0jv2G — Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) October 31, 2017

The tweet immediately garnered fierce blowback, with replies informing Trump Jr. that, for example, Chloe Trump might not want to be a lifelong poster child for the lesson that sharing is bad. The tweet was both a ham-fisted attempt to politicize Halloween and a wrongheaded civics lesson.

First, on the point of Halloween, it’s bizarre to build a case for free-market orthodoxy on Halloween, since the holiday’s main activity is the antithesis of a market: It’s all handouts. Halloween is a hilariously bad object lesson on the merits of the free market and the moral dangers of freebies. Even if one insists that dressing up as a werewolf is a form of “labor,” there is a lot of daylight between redistribution—which is what Trump Jr. is actually criticizing in this tweet—and full-blown socialism, which would imply something far stranger, like federal ownership of Twizzler factories and government mandates on M&M distribution. (As it turns out Halloween is a far better metaphor for inheritance—with which Trump Jr. has some familiarity. Dressing up in clothes purchased by one’s parents, following them around on business, smiling hopefully as they make introductions to wealthy friends, and reaping the considerable bounty of their affluence and social networks is pretty much exactly what inheritance is all about.)