"It's a Good Life"

Over at Positive Liberty, Timothy Sandefur says of the Twilight Zone adaptation [1] of Jerome Bixby's terrific horror story, "It's a Good Life," that "[i]f there is a better literary expression of life in the Stalin-style, Kim Jong Il-style, brutal totalitarian dictatorship, I’ve never seen it."  It's been some time since I've seen the TW version, but I don't think you can make this argument based on the original text. Bixby's Anthony Fremont is horrifying not because he's evil, let alone a totalitarian dictator, but because he's three years old: he understands that others feel pleasure and pain, and even tries to please them on occasion (usually, with unfortunate results), but his worldview still revolves around himself and his own particular "likes."  To make matters worse, despite his telepathic and telekinetic powers, Anthony doesn't possess a superhuman intellect.  He acts irrationally and on impulse, doesn't altogether understand the adults around him, and shows no signs of real purposefulness in his various demonstrations of power [2].  The problem, of course, is that an omnipotent three-year-old can't be disciplined; moreover, since Anthony may or may not be human (there are some hints that he isn't), it's unclear if he would ever be capable of truly empathizing with Peaksville's other residents.  In other words, Bixby carefully fudges the question of Anthony's intentions by insisting on his terrifyingly magnified immaturity, and thus scumbles any neat connections between Anthony's behavior and totalitarian politics.  It's quite possible that Bixby had life under totalitarian governments in the back of his mind as he was writing, but the story itself resists being allegorized in that manner.

UPDATE: I agree with Peter Brigg's point that "Anthony has immense powers but wholly immature moral judgement, which puts him part way between the omnipotent Judeo-Christian god and the capricious Greek Olympians."

[1]  The revived TW did a sequel, "It's Still a Good Life," with the original's Anthony Fremont, Bill Mumy; the 1983 film somehow managed to put a positive spin on the tale. 
[2]  Which, in the short story, are left almost entirely to the reader's imagination; we don't actually know what happens to Dan Hollis, for example.