Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders is inching ever closer to Hillary Clinton in the presidential polls. And why not? Sanders is saying he’ll create a utopian society where everyone is looked after without doing any work, the rich are penalized and the government is the all-knowing, powerful body to ensure you’re safe.
In a recent interview with CNN, he revealed a couple of things: he’ll raise taxes significantly on the wealthy and corporations and he’d bring in Keynesian interventionist economists into his cabinet, like Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz and Robert Reich. Any of those names should send shivers up and down our spines. He also wants to have some sort of work program. Ugh.
Sanders likely won’t become president because Clinton will. We all have to face it: Clinton is president in waiting, no one will stop her.
But Economic Policy Journal publisher and editor Robert Wenzel made an interesting comment about Sanders:
“In his mind, he thinks the Soviet Union and Communist China collapsed only because he wasn’t in charge.
“His populist/communist spiel is very dangerous, a chunk of the masses will buy into it.”
It’s interesting because a lot of people fall into this line of thinking when discussing socialist societies. They always bring up some sort of excuse or defense and note that if they were in charge this socialist or communist country wouldn’t have collapsed. Or, the best one around, they weren’t really socialist!
Moreover, Sanders’s comments about more taxes, Keynesian economics and bigger government appeals to a lot of people (millions of people died in the name of Karl Marx, Joseph Stalin, Mao Tse-Tung, Vladimir Lenin and so on). Just take a look at Occupy Wall Street: an exponential number of people iterated exactly what Sanders is talking about. This is a popular opinion held by millions of Americans who can’t grasp that government is the one to cause most of our problems.
Clinton will maintain the status quo – cronyism and big government – but Sanders, an Alan Arkin lookalike, would amplify the size of Washington significantly so he can have a socialist society modeled off of Scandinavia (but he’ll refuse the $0 minimum wage). If you want anyone to hate the state then Clinton is your man, er, woman.
Kit says
Keynesian economics was a capitalist, not a socialist, idea. It was cooked up to rescue the crisis ridden capitalism of the 1930s. Soviet “communism” was not Keynesian. In the USSR capitalism had been abolished. The means of production was controlled by a bureaucratic elite which bore no resemblance either to a capitalist class or a “workers’ state”.
If you want an example of Keynesian economics taken to the extreme, look at Nazi Germany, 1933-36.
georgcantor6 says
My hunch is that Hillary won’t be the next president–as long as illegal aliens and psychopaths (the ones who are felons) are prevented from voting.