print“Burn-The-Wealth Bernie & His Partial Enslavement System” is the current column, now on The Unz Review, America’s smartest webzine. An excerpt:
“The top one-tenth of 1 percent in this country own almost 90 percent … as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent,” roared the independent senator from Vermont, Bernie Sanders, at the first Democratic primary debate of 2015, in Las Vegas.
Standing for president, Sanders implies, somehow, that there exists in nature a delimited income pie from which a disproportionate amount of wealth is handed over to, or seized, by a class of evil doers: “the rich.”
Clueless Sanders omits the process by which that wealth magically materializes.
Wealth doesn’t exist pristine in nature, until individuals—deserving as much, if not more, of the pope’s love as the poor—apply their smarts, labor and savings to transform raw materials into marketable things that satisfy human desire and need.
But not if one listens to the socialist from Vermont as, sadly, too many Americans did.
You ask, why was it not just as discouraging when even more Americans tuned in to watch the first and second Republican Primary Debates, 24 and 23 million respectively?
For this reason: While Republicans are never to be equated with freedom, smaller government, or anything remotely libertarian; the voting public equates a vote for a Republican with a vote for less government and more freedom from the state.
Therefore, an interest in and a support for a Democrat is often a reliable proxy for the measure of statism in the land.
Over fifteen million viewers tuned in to watch two washed-out, walking clichés of the hard left (Hillary Clinton and Mr. Sanders) join two other political phantoms no one had heard of before (Martin O’Malley and Lincoln Chafee), to malign and bring down their betters: the “highly productive and provident one percent that provides the standard of living of a largely ignorant and ungrateful ninety-nine percent,” in the words of professor George Reisman, author of the seminal “Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics.”
Countering Sanders’ pie-in-the-sky economics, Reisman notes that, “The wealth of the 1 percent is the overwhelming source of the supply of goods that people buy and of the demand for labor that people sell.” The wealth of the rich is not to be found in a huge pile of goods from which only capitalists benefit, but in the means of production that benefit us all. …
Read the rest.“Burn-The-Wealth Bernie & His Partial Enslavement System” is the current column, now on The Unz Review.
UPDATED (1/5/2016): Bernie Sanders ‘thinks’ that at heart, ISIS terrorists are really farmers who’ve been frustrated by climate change.
UPDATE II (2/7): https://twitter.com/IlanaMercer/status/693978051172958209