The Scrapbook is generally pleased that Bernie Sanders has decided to enter the presidential race. Where Democrats laughably insist that they are mere pragmatists free from ideological cant, the senator from Vermont is refreshingly honest about his desire to impose socialism on America. However, this honesty doesn’t excuse the fact that Sanders’s campaign thus far is mostly a doddering old man spouting half-baked economic ideas.
In defiance of all basic logic and the accumulated wisdom of human civilization, economics remains a zero-sum game for progressives such as Sanders. The problem is that their willingness to pile new trillion-dollar obligations on top of our existing debts requires them to keep defining Other People’s Money down. And so basic comforts of civilization are now being viewed as suspiciously decadent bourgeois indulgences by Sanders and his ilk. In a recent interview with the New York Times’s John Harwood, Sanders pretty much gives up the game:
He doesn’t flinch over returning to the 90 percent personal income tax rates of the 1950s for top earners. And if reducing income inequality reduces economic growth, he says, that’s fine. “You don’t necessarily need a choice of 23 underarm spray deodorants,” he said, “when children are hungry in this country.”
This short passage prompts so many questions it’s hard to know where to begin. If reducing income inequality must necessarily mean reducing economic growth, who decides what’s to be done and implements the necessary sacrifices? If reducing our options for spray deodorants means we’re able to feed hungry kids, think how many more hungry kids we’d be able to feed if we just rationed everything to each person according to their need. Why hasn’t anyone tried such a fiendishly clever economic system before?
Of course, there is no more effective anti-poverty program than basic economic growth, and the statistics testifying to this are staggering. The fact that we can choose between dozens of different and affordable deodorants is a consequence of the highly efficient allocation of resources, not proof of inefficiency. But instead of laughing in his face or noting that reams of economic literature from public choice theory to good old supply and demand prove that Sanders’s economic logic would actually make more kids starve, the Times headlined the interview: “Bernie Sanders: A Revolution With an Eye on the Hungry Children.” Nearly a century ago, some left-wing journalist likely observed the October Revolution was all about hungry children as well. The ever credulous New York Times seems to have learned nothing of economic reality in the meantime.
As for the remainder of the policy prescriptions being bandied about in the Democratic presidential primary—minimum wage increases, free college tuition and health care, tax hikes, etc.—it’s remarkable how backward looking it all is. It seems the Democratic political program is stuck in a funk, and if Sanders and his party have their way, the country will smell like one, too.
