Originally posted by psmith81992
https://mises.org/library/economics-bernie-sanders
At the same time, I do not want to let Sanders off the hook. He promotes economic nationalism and has built his campaign upon resentment, the kind of which Henry Hazlitt wrote in 1966 in his famous, “Marxism in One Minute.” Hazlitt wrote:The whole gospel of Karl Marx can be summed up in a single sentence: Hate the man who is better off than you are. Never under any circumstances admit that his success may be due to his own efforts, to the productive contribution he has made to the whole community. Always attribute his success to the exploitation, the cheating, the more or less open robbery of others. (Emphasis mine)
Mmm, I can't agree with that.
Wanting to fight inequality with socialism =/= resentment or hating people better off than them.
Lesse, another bit:
Americans are not jobless because some people are not paying “their fair share” of taxes; they are jobless because the US government insists on directing resources from higher-valued uses to lower-valued uses, as determined by consumer choice.So, what does Sanders propose to “revitalize” the US economy? Here are some things listed on his website:
....
Raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour;
Expand the reach of labor unions and vastly expand their membership;
....
Create a “youth jobs program” in which unemployed young people are given government-sponsored jobs (Sanders sees no connection between high minimum wages and youth unemployment);
....
Spend at least a trillion dollars on building and repairing roads, bridges, and utilities;
....
Enact a Canada-style single-payer healthcare system;
Provide free tuition for all public colleges and universities;....
Notice that there is nothing in the Sanders platform that calls for “nationalization” of the means of production, nor does he propose to do away with the price system. In other words, Sanders’s vision of socialism is not what Mao or Trotsky or Lenin proposed, yet there is not one thing in the entire platform that would reverse the dangerous economic trends of the past decade.
Note that the article says there's nothing that reverses the trends, but I left in five on the list that'd have a major or minor effect- giving higher income to the lower class will increase demand, which drives economic growth.
Labor unions protect worker's rights and have been statistically linked with better economic equality.
A trillion dollars on building and repairing roads, bridges, and utilities is not only one of the 'high value' uses the article just chided him on not doing, directly paying a lot of people to do a lot of jobs with good return, but it has major indirect value as worktime commutes, car repairs, and other inefficiencies in just about every business get reduced. Drop the daily commutes of tens of millions of people by minutes (sometimes more, where capacity can be increased), and you're pretty soon talking huge amounts of time saved, measured in big piles of person-years.
The US currently loses trillions of gallons of water *per year* due to aging infrastructure. Fixing the infrastructure simply saves money long term...
Youth job programs, well, that's facing unemployment in the most direct way of all, giving jobs.
And of course, Canada-style single payer healthcare costs notably less than Obamacare (and even further less than old health care) for even better covering, and it has positive economic/wealth inequality benefits by making health costs, which hit the poor quite heavily due to their lack of financial cushions, poof, vanish. Similarly, education costs. If better education is free, then it's easier to get higher paying jobs.
Which is not to say there's not problems with the list,
Break up banks and financial institutions;
This includes institutions like the Federal Reserve, which played a large role in our recovery from the financial crash.
Make it illegal for US corporations to manufacture goods abroad, and then sell those goods in the USA;
This'd put us in trade wars that'd cost us way more than it benefited.
Even so, Bernie clearly has a positive intent, despite a couple policies being quite iffy he has a lot of proposals which you can point to and say, "THIS is clearly intended to help with THAT."
If I could put the economics of Bernie Sanders into a nutshell, it would be this: Burden private enterprise with one directive after another, and then demonize it when it ultimately falls down under the awful weight of taxes, higher costs, and mandates.
The ironic thing is the article's own list of what Bernie does contradicts this.