Bernie Sanders preaches to his flock the need to create an "economy that works for all, not just the wealthy," but as evidenced by the desperate desire among the world's poorest to get to the U.S., that economy already exists. The world's poor are busy escaping the collectivism Sanders espouses, at which point we can only look to the well-to-do and careless as the source of Sanders' support. Sanders disdains great wealth, but it's only in a country marked by abundant success and a lack of want that Sanders could have a following at all. Forbes.com.
By John Tamny
THE END OF WORLD WAR II brought with it the end of the British Empire as it
was previously known. While in 1945 a British passport rendered the owner of it
a citizen of one quarter of the world's land mass, within a few years the empire
had shrunk quite a bit. India, the presumed "Jewel" in the Crown, was soon to be
free thanks to the efforts of independence leaders like Mahatma
Gandhi.
While he was uncomfortable with socialists whom he saw as "armchair" owing
to their unwillingness to live in impoverished fashion, Gandhi sought an
egalitarian India with ideas for the country that most today would view as
socialist. As Larry Collins and Dominique LaPierre described his vision in
their endlessly interesting book, Freedom at Midnight,
"All labour, physical or intellectual, would carry the same reward in Gandhi's India. It was not a property qualification that would earn a man the right to vote in his state, but a labour qualification. To get it, everybody would have to contribute physical labour to the state. Nobody, including saints or sages, would be exempt. The ditch digger would get his almost automatically, but the lawyer or millionaire would have to earn his with calluses."
A well-bred and educated lawyer himself, Gandhi strived to live as the
"untouchables" of India did, including limiting his food intake to the bare
minimum necessary to survive. Yet despite the leader's pose, lost on Gandhi
were the costs related to keeping him "poor."
As one of his allies (Sarojini Naidu) relayed to Lord Mountbatten (the
British official charged with overseeing India's path to independence), Gandhi's
ability to travel on third class trains was a function of numerous Congress
Party officials dressing up as "untouchables" in order to protect him. Though
Gandhi lived in India's slums, faux untouchables from the Party surrounded him
in a protective cocoon there too. As Naidu put it to Mountbatten, "My dear Lord
Louis, you will never know how much it has cost the Congress Party to keep that
old man in poverty."
Gandhi's somewhat faux poverty came to mind amid a recent campaign stop for
Bernie Sanders at Georgetown University. Full of the
well-to-do and well educated, it's no surprise that the Democratic presidential
hopeful would find willing listeners at a school largely defined by a lack of
want within its student body.
More broadly, it would be interesting to learn the educational attainments
and income of the average Sanders partisan, or better yet, average Sanders
donor. Odds are they don't hail from the "working families" or "sick and poor"
classes that Sanders claims to represent.
Instead, Sanders embodies the hopes and dreams of people like Livia
Matteucci, a Georgetown student who is majoring in psychology. As USA Today reported about Matteucci, "she and other Georgetown
students support ideas such as paid family leave and a higher minimum wage"
energetically promoted by Sanders. How very fitting.
Figure Matteucci will graduate into the kinds of companies that already
offer family leave, not to mention that her pay upon graduation will well exceed
the "minimum" wages that her emotions tell her are good for others. The average Georgetown student most likely last earned the
minimum wage in high school as a source of pocket money to supplement an upper
middle class lifestyle funded by well-educated and well-employed parents; that,
or someone from this demographic was well off enough to "toil" as an unpaid
intern.
Those who will truly be affected by what's popular among Sanders partisans
are those who most likely have never heard of the Vermont senator. Many likely
haven't heard of Georgetown either, yet they'll be victimized by the yearnings
of those who matriculated to the elite and very expensive school.
It's the very people who don't have time to contemplate family leave and
wage floors who will experience a more difficult hiring environment as a result
of costly rules foisted on employers. The people who would pay for Sanders'
unreason probably aren't terribly aware of a socialist candidate who denies
being a socialist, and they aren't because they're too busy working to
care.
Sanders told his Georgetown audience "that we must create an economy that
works for all, not just the very wealthy." Why wouldn't he say that at ritzy
Georgetown? When you're already wealthy, it's easy to disdain the trappings of
same.
Interesting about this is that to look at the Republicans vying for the GOP
nomination, just about every single one (arguably to the detriment of every
American worker, rich or poor) has called for erasing federal income taxes on
the lowest earners, all the while maintaining the highest rates for those whom
Sanders would deem rich. Sanders seeks even higher rates of taxation on the
"rich." What this should signal to the rest of us is that Republicans and
Democrats are in a fight over who will tax the rich the most. More explicitly
it tells us that both major political parties aren't exactly seeking favor with
the wealthy.
Sanders or his partisans might respond that what he's really looking to do
is end the bailout culture that reached full flower under a Republican in George
W. Bush, and that continued under a Democrat in President Obama. If so, such a
move would be a boon for the wealth creators.
We know this simply because the source of Silicon Valley's wealth has been
the constant failure that has long defined the world's most innovative economic
region. Imagine how much less well off the Valley would be today if former
darlings like Webvan, Friendster and theglobe.com had been bailed out. Assuming
the proper cessation of Wall Street bailouts, the result (a
good one in this writer's eyes) will be a great deal more wealth thanks to lousy
stewards of capital being starved of it so that the best Wall Street firms and
minds can receive it in abundance. Amen to that.
As has been already mentioned, Sanders wants "an economy that works for
all, not just the very wealthy," but as the yearnings of the world's poor to
live in the U.S. constantly remind us, the truly impoverished want nothing to do
with Sanders' socialism. In truth, they're actively trying to escape the
collectivism that Sanders' espouses with an eye on the abundance wrought by a
profit motive perfected in the United States.
Sanders has told his flock that the "billionaire class must be told loudly
and clearly that they cannot have it all," but back in the real world
billionaire-style wealth constantly reveals itself as the biggest enemy of the
want that has historically defined poverty. The Walton
familygot rich by virtue of making life's necessities (including groceries)
available to the poor and middle class at increasingly low prices, Henry Ford
transformed the once hard to attain automobile into a common good, and Michael
Dell became a billionaire by turning computers that used to cost over $1 million
into an everyday item.
Only in a country this rich and billionaire dense could kids spend four
glorious years in college spouting policies that, if actually implemented, would
render their families too poor to send them to college in the first place. Only
in a country as rich as ours could those out of school have the time and
resources to promote and financially support a candidate whose ideas have most
often correlated with extreme poverty and unemployment.
If there's a negative tradeoff to prosperity, it's that we have to suffer
politicians like Sanders. Indeed, prosperity allows some of us to be truly
careless in terms of whom we support for elected in office, thus making people
like him possible. The irony behind a Sanders' platform defined by disdain of
great wealth is that he's 100% a creation of it.
John Tamny is Political Economy editor at Forbes, editor of
RealClearMarkets, and author of Popular Economics: What the
Rolling Stones, Downton Abbey and LeBron James Can Teach You about
Economics(Regnery, 2015). His next book, Who Needs the
Fed?(Encounter Books), will be released in May of 2016.
