Who Has Two Thumbs And Loves Capitalism?
This Guy
Bernie’s an interesting dude. I’d love to spend a weekend with him, preferably at his vacation home on Lake Champlain in the middle of summer: nice rustic digs, 500 square feet of lakefront property…
Well done Bernie
Even though he regularly disparages the vacation-home set, I don’t begrudge him his vacation home, or his first home, and certainly not his second home. That property is a sensible little sliver of D.C. real estate that would no doubt make his immigrant ancestors’ chests swell with pride knowing that one of their own made it out of the rent control district and into a fashionable district in the District…
Very well done. I love those trees. Just adorable.
I’m proud of Bernie. He came up from nothing and leveraged a stump speech into a stint as mayor and then 26+ years in Congress, which led to the release of a book — Our Revolution — that netted him $868,000 in 2016, pushing his total compensation over the $1,000,000 mark for the first time in his life (a feat he repeated in 2017.)
Well done Bernie. Well done. Go get you a vacation home on the lake, and then go take a vacation. You deserve it.
Of course haters resent the windfall. To them it seems paradoxical that a man who made his living railing on America’s 1%er’s should retain the profits that admit him into that much maligned country club. For the record though, I do not begrudge him any of his dollars. It’s always been my policy to admire, not resent hard-earned success… but maybe the critics have a point.
I don’t know.
What I do know is that when his detractors started calling him out for becoming a millionaire, he responded with a two-liner so gangster that he ought to be admitted to the Thug Life Hall of Fame on the first ballot:
“I wrote a best-selling book. If you write a best-selling book, you can be a millionaire, too.”A more articulate description of the economic system I admire, I can hardly hope to find. If you want to understand the nuances and beauty of the free market you can read The Wealth of Nations or anything by Thomas Sowell, or you can study the above masterpiece of concision by America’s most famous socialist. Here it is one more time in case you didn’t memorize the limerick the first time around
“I wrote a best-selling book. If you write a best-selling book, you can be a millionaire, too.”Bernie’s retort eloquently highlights the fact that whenever an economy’s transactions are governed by voluntary exchange (as is ours,) the free market is inherently democratic: of the people, by the people, for the people. In a market economy Bernie can’t force people to send their money to his publisher, he must instead leverage eloquence to induce them to willingly transfer their cash to the company that printed his book. But if after turning over their hard-earned dollars to Bernie’s publisher, the reading public dislikes the screed, sales will dry up. Without sales the publisher will bring the printing run to an end and I will have no hope for a weekend at Bernie’s unpurchased lakeside crib.
Free markets are mankind’s most elegant solution to the problem of scarcity (not perfect, just ingenious.) Better than any other mechanism known to man, the free enterprise system answers the question of who should produce what, how much, and at what price?Occam’s razor would be so proud.
But during this election cycle I doubt you’ll hear Bernie praise the glories of the free market. Instead he’ll boom against “The one puhcent!” claiming that “the system is rigged” so that “the rich get rich-uh and the poor get poor-uh!” It’s a zero-sum sermon he preaches. Someone (except — of course — the people who purchased his book) always gets screwed anytime someone else turns a healthy profit. If you take the time to listen to candidate Sanders, read his writings or scroll through his twitter feed you’ll notice a theme: economic transactions are rarely — if ever — symbiotic. At nearly every turn we need Bernie’s strong arm to make right what Lady Justice didn’t notice through her blindfold. It’s almost like Bernie read the opening lines of the Communist Manifesto…
“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed…”
And really, really believed them.
Well, in the interest of fairness, maybe he should believe them? After all, in our capitalist system people do get ripped off, left behind, devoured. Of course they do. Every day. Rub shoulders with enough downtrodden and it won’t be difficult to see why some people believe that the system is binary, with only “Haves” and “Have nots.” Maybe, as the Democratic Socialist of America’s constitution declares, we need to “reject an economic order based on private profit, alienated labor, gross inequalities of wealth and power…” etc. etc. Maybe Bernie offers us a cure for the ailments of an economic system that does misfire? Certainly his sermons tug at our heart strings, at least they tug at mine. But like King Agrippa of old, despite the tug, at best I muster a tepid “almost thou persuadest me to be a socialist.”
For those wondering why I’m not ready to go all in on Bernie’s command economy, my reluctance has two causes:
The answer to those questions, humbly I submit, lies in this underlying truth about the free market: the dollar is democratic.
Certainly oligarchs can leverage politicians and financial or other legal antics to game the system for a time, but if free markets are allowed to live up to their name big company’s will only retain their size if they earn our dollar-based vote (in the just-linked video, please note both the turnover and the color of the flag that keeps popping up on the left.)
2. Not only do I not believe the system is rigged, I don’t believe Bernie Sanders is a socialist, or a Democratic Socialist… or whatever. If you ask me, Bernie Sanders — at his core — is a capitalist.
I know that’s a hard pill to swallow for any true believers out there, but do recall the previously referenced Bernie quote and then combine it with this one from Zac Petkanas about Bernie’s preferred flying arrangements during the Clinton campaign:
“I’m not shocked that while thousands of volunteers braved the heat and cold to knock on doors until their fingers bled in a desperate effort to stop Donald Trump, his Royal Majesty King Bernie Sanders would only deign to leave his plush D.C. office or his brand new second home on the lake if he was flown around on a cushy private jet like a billionaire master of the universe.”
Now friends, if you think I threw in that quote to criticize Bernie you are mistaken. I included that quote to criticize Zac. That dude doesn’t seem to understand that just because the Clinton campaign desperately needed Bernie’s assistance to drag their candidate across the finish line, doesn’t mean that they had a right to Bernie’s labor. Needs don’t generate rights, and unfortunately they never will. Not even when you enshrine the right in your nation’s constitution (South Africa made access to health care a constitutional right, but legislative acts not passed by Dumbledore aren’t magic.) So when Zac gets angry at Bernie for not Southwesting it across the country, he does so on the basis that his desperation somehow birthed a license to Bernie’s time. But Bernie knew better (God bless him.) His labor was and is his own, to distribute as he saw and sees fit, voluntarily. And though he probably considers his life to be of infinite value, his skill set clearly has a price: $100,000 in private jet fees during the campaign and over $250,000 since, in case you wanted to know.
Zac clearly resents the money the campaign spent ferrying Bernie around the country, but not because Bernie did something objectively wrong. Zac is only upset because his candidate lost. Had Hillary won he would have considered the charter fees a prudent investment and he would have cheered rather than resented Bernie. Zac isn’t angry because Bernie violated some proletarian truth, Zac’s angry because he’s not living the dream as a White House aide. But you know who is living the dream?
Bernie H. Sanders. God bless him.
I’ve arrived at that conclusion because of a line he deploys repeatedly every time he wants to lay into the United States for not behaving sufficiently communal. It goes something like this…
“In the wealthiest country in the history of the world it is simply not acceptable that ____________________” (fill in the blank with a rant against anyone who’s not for replacing market outcomes with federally mandated outcomes.)
After hearing that line over and over again, I began to wonder — not why we don’t have more entitlement programs — but how did this country become the wealthiest country in the history of the world? Seriously, how’d it happen? I know how Bernie’s party answers that question because it’s printed in the first paragraph of their Constitution. According to them we’re where we are because of “Gross inequalities of wealth and power, discrimination based on race, sex, sexual orientation, gender expression, disability status, age, religion, and national origin, and brutality and violence in defense of the status quo.”
But is that how Bernie made it to the top? Did he spend his life discriminating based on “race, sex, sexual orientation” etc. etc.? If not, is he the only 1%er who didn’t commit all of those crimes as he was movin’ on up or are there others? Either way, doesn’t his life’s trajectory prove that you can still make it in America? If not, shouldn’t we explain that unfortunate fact to the millions of people from around the world who every year try to take up residence here? Shouldn’t we tell them that they’ve been duped, that America’s wealth is inextricably tied to oppression and theft and that in the U.S. they’re only going to get exploited? Maybe it’s true that slavery and its modern day repercussions are the only explanation for America’s economic dominance. But if so, then shouldn’t Brazil be the wealthiest country on earth? After all, that country imported over ten times as many slaves as were brought to Mexico, the U.S. and Canada combined. But if slavery and oppression didn’t lay the foundations for our country’s success, then what did? It can’t be socialism, because I have it on good word from every socialist that I’ve ever talked to that a true socialist state has never existed. But if “true socialism” has never been tried, why not? And why in 2015, amidst Bernie’s repeated praises of Nordic “socialism,” did Denmark’s Prime Minister offer this rebuttal, “I know that some people in the US associate the Nordic model with some sort of socialism. Therefore I would like to make one thing clear. Denmark is far from a socialist planned economy. Denmark is a market economy.” But if Denmark’s “market economy,” with it’s massive income redistribution programs, has created the city-on-a-hill society that we must emulate, then why is Denmark and the rest of Scandinavia so mono-cultural? On planet earth, is there a more pale-faced country than Norway? If the Northern Europeans have successfully established Utopia why isn’t the Statue of Liberty located in Finland? And if nothing beats living in Scandinavia, then what’s with their suicide rate? Maybe suicide is the reason the nations of the world aren’t flocking to Sweden. Speaking of the Swedes, if they are so good at health care and we’re so bad at it, why has the U.S. filed more medical patents over the last four decades than most countries on the planet combined? And speaking of the planet, since 1990 the spread of what economic system has contributed to the reduction of global poverty rates by half? Couldn’t it be at least partly attributed to the further spread of “an economic order based on private profit?” If not, then what economic order is it? And — now l know this is going to sound crazy — but since all of these questions rattling around my head were placed there by Bernie Sanders’ “In the wealthiest country in the history of the world” line, might not he be an ironic Manchurian candidate? I know it’s almost too absurd to consider, but could he be attempting to bring down the left’s economic model from the inside? Is he a free-enterprise mole?
Well done Bernie. Well done. Go get you a vacation home on the lake, and then go take a vacation. You deserve it.
Of course haters resent the windfall. To them it seems paradoxical that a man who made his living railing on America’s 1%er’s should retain the profits that admit him into that much maligned country club. For the record though, I do not begrudge him any of his dollars. It’s always been my policy to admire, not resent hard-earned success… but maybe the critics have a point.
I don’t know.
What I do know is that when his detractors started calling him out for becoming a millionaire, he responded with a two-liner so gangster that he ought to be admitted to the Thug Life Hall of Fame on the first ballot:
“I wrote a best-selling book. If you write a best-selling book, you can be a millionaire, too.”A more articulate description of the economic system I admire, I can hardly hope to find. If you want to understand the nuances and beauty of the free market you can read The Wealth of Nations or anything by Thomas Sowell, or you can study the above masterpiece of concision by America’s most famous socialist. Here it is one more time in case you didn’t memorize the limerick the first time around
“I wrote a best-selling book. If you write a best-selling book, you can be a millionaire, too.”Bernie’s retort eloquently highlights the fact that whenever an economy’s transactions are governed by voluntary exchange (as is ours,) the free market is inherently democratic: of the people, by the people, for the people. In a market economy Bernie can’t force people to send their money to his publisher, he must instead leverage eloquence to induce them to willingly transfer their cash to the company that printed his book. But if after turning over their hard-earned dollars to Bernie’s publisher, the reading public dislikes the screed, sales will dry up. Without sales the publisher will bring the printing run to an end and I will have no hope for a weekend at Bernie’s unpurchased lakeside crib.
Free markets are mankind’s most elegant solution to the problem of scarcity (not perfect, just ingenious.) Better than any other mechanism known to man, the free enterprise system answers the question of who should produce what, how much, and at what price?
But during this election cycle I doubt you’ll hear Bernie praise the glories of the free market. Instead he’ll boom against “The one puhcent!” claiming that “the system is rigged” so that “the rich get rich-uh and the poor get poor-uh!” It’s a zero-sum sermon he preaches. Someone (except — of course — the people who purchased his book) always gets screwed anytime someone else turns a healthy profit. If you take the time to listen to candidate Sanders, read his writings or scroll through his twitter feed you’ll notice a theme: economic transactions are rarely — if ever — symbiotic. At nearly every turn we need Bernie’s strong arm to make right what Lady Justice didn’t notice through her blindfold. It’s almost like Bernie read the opening lines of the Communist Manifesto…
“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed…”
And really, really believed them.
Well, in the interest of fairness, maybe he should believe them? After all, in our capitalist system people do get ripped off, left behind, devoured. Of course they do. Every day. Rub shoulders with enough downtrodden and it won’t be difficult to see why some people believe that the system is binary, with only “Haves” and “Have nots.” Maybe, as the Democratic Socialist of America’s constitution declares, we need to “reject an economic order based on private profit, alienated labor, gross inequalities of wealth and power…” etc. etc. Maybe Bernie offers us a cure for the ailments of an economic system that does misfire? Certainly his sermons tug at our heart strings, at least they tug at mine. But like King Agrippa of old, despite the tug, at best I muster a tepid “almost thou persuadest me to be a socialist.”
For those wondering why I’m not ready to go all in on Bernie’s command economy, my reluctance has two causes:
- I don’t believe the system is rigged. Or at least, if the system is rigged, the riggers have done a poor job of rigging it.
The answer to those questions, humbly I submit, lies in this underlying truth about the free market: the dollar is democratic.
Certainly oligarchs can leverage politicians and financial or other legal antics to game the system for a time, but if free markets are allowed to live up to their name big company’s will only retain their size if they earn our dollar-based vote (in the just-linked video, please note both the turnover and the color of the flag that keeps popping up on the left.)
2. Not only do I not believe the system is rigged, I don’t believe Bernie Sanders is a socialist, or a Democratic Socialist… or whatever. If you ask me, Bernie Sanders — at his core — is a capitalist.
I know that’s a hard pill to swallow for any true believers out there, but do recall the previously referenced Bernie quote and then combine it with this one from Zac Petkanas about Bernie’s preferred flying arrangements during the Clinton campaign:
“I’m not shocked that while thousands of volunteers braved the heat and cold to knock on doors until their fingers bled in a desperate effort to stop Donald Trump, his Royal Majesty King Bernie Sanders would only deign to leave his plush D.C. office or his brand new second home on the lake if he was flown around on a cushy private jet like a billionaire master of the universe.”
Now friends, if you think I threw in that quote to criticize Bernie you are mistaken. I included that quote to criticize Zac. That dude doesn’t seem to understand that just because the Clinton campaign desperately needed Bernie’s assistance to drag their candidate across the finish line, doesn’t mean that they had a right to Bernie’s labor. Needs don’t generate rights, and unfortunately they never will. Not even when you enshrine the right in your nation’s constitution (South Africa made access to health care a constitutional right, but legislative acts not passed by Dumbledore aren’t magic.) So when Zac gets angry at Bernie for not Southwesting it across the country, he does so on the basis that his desperation somehow birthed a license to Bernie’s time. But Bernie knew better (God bless him.) His labor was and is his own, to distribute as he saw and sees fit, voluntarily. And though he probably considers his life to be of infinite value, his skill set clearly has a price: $100,000 in private jet fees during the campaign and over $250,000 since, in case you wanted to know.
Zac clearly resents the money the campaign spent ferrying Bernie around the country, but not because Bernie did something objectively wrong. Zac is only upset because his candidate lost. Had Hillary won he would have considered the charter fees a prudent investment and he would have cheered rather than resented Bernie. Zac isn’t angry because Bernie violated some proletarian truth, Zac’s angry because he’s not living the dream as a White House aide. But you know who is living the dream?
Bernie H. Sanders. God bless him.
I’ve arrived at that conclusion because of a line he deploys repeatedly every time he wants to lay into the United States for not behaving sufficiently communal. It goes something like this…
“In the wealthiest country in the history of the world it is simply not acceptable that ____________________” (fill in the blank with a rant against anyone who’s not for replacing market outcomes with federally mandated outcomes.)
After hearing that line over and over again, I began to wonder — not why we don’t have more entitlement programs — but how did this country become the wealthiest country in the history of the world? Seriously, how’d it happen? I know how Bernie’s party answers that question because it’s printed in the first paragraph of their Constitution. According to them we’re where we are because of “Gross inequalities of wealth and power, discrimination based on race, sex, sexual orientation, gender expression, disability status, age, religion, and national origin, and brutality and violence in defense of the status quo.”
But is that how Bernie made it to the top? Did he spend his life discriminating based on “race, sex, sexual orientation” etc. etc.? If not, is he the only 1%er who didn’t commit all of those crimes as he was movin’ on up or are there others? Either way, doesn’t his life’s trajectory prove that you can still make it in America? If not, shouldn’t we explain that unfortunate fact to the millions of people from around the world who every year try to take up residence here? Shouldn’t we tell them that they’ve been duped, that America’s wealth is inextricably tied to oppression and theft and that in the U.S. they’re only going to get exploited? Maybe it’s true that slavery and its modern day repercussions are the only explanation for America’s economic dominance. But if so, then shouldn’t Brazil be the wealthiest country on earth? After all, that country imported over ten times as many slaves as were brought to Mexico, the U.S. and Canada combined. But if slavery and oppression didn’t lay the foundations for our country’s success, then what did? It can’t be socialism, because I have it on good word from every socialist that I’ve ever talked to that a true socialist state has never existed. But if “true socialism” has never been tried, why not? And why in 2015, amidst Bernie’s repeated praises of Nordic “socialism,” did Denmark’s Prime Minister offer this rebuttal, “I know that some people in the US associate the Nordic model with some sort of socialism. Therefore I would like to make one thing clear. Denmark is far from a socialist planned economy. Denmark is a market economy.” But if Denmark’s “market economy,” with it’s massive income redistribution programs, has created the city-on-a-hill society that we must emulate, then why is Denmark and the rest of Scandinavia so mono-cultural? On planet earth, is there a more pale-faced country than Norway? If the Northern Europeans have successfully established Utopia why isn’t the Statue of Liberty located in Finland? And if nothing beats living in Scandinavia, then what’s with their suicide rate? Maybe suicide is the reason the nations of the world aren’t flocking to Sweden. Speaking of the Swedes, if they are so good at health care and we’re so bad at it, why has the U.S. filed more medical patents over the last four decades than most countries on the planet combined? And speaking of the planet, since 1990 the spread of what economic system has contributed to the reduction of global poverty rates by half? Couldn’t it be at least partly attributed to the further spread of “an economic order based on private profit?” If not, then what economic order is it? And — now l know this is going to sound crazy — but since all of these questions rattling around my head were placed there by Bernie Sanders’ “In the wealthiest country in the history of the world” line, might not he be an ironic Manchurian candidate? I know it’s almost too absurd to consider, but could he be attempting to bring down the left’s economic model from the inside? Is he a free-enterprise mole?
Seriously, before the first vote is cast in the next election don’t we have a right to know if Bernie Sanders is actually a capitalist?
