From Will Tippens at LewRockwell.com via davidstockmanscontracorner.com:
I get why people like Bernie Sanders.
He seems like a genuine person. Most of his funding comes from grassroots donors and he has a mostly-deserved outsider status. He’s honest about his political beliefs, and isn’t afraid to call himself a socialist. He has all the rancorous charm of Peter Finch in the 1976 film, Network:
He’s mad as hell and he’s not going to take it anymore!
There’s only one problem: he really wants to start a revolution, but forgot to bring any revolutionary ideas to the rally. His policy prescriptions–far from fresh, radical, or different–have long comprised the political status quo in Washington. While it’s true he often diagnoses real issues, he almost always suggests solutions that are a contributing or root cause of the problems in the first place.
He rightly sees student loan debt as an issue, yet he wants to flood the market with even more worthless college degrees by making public colleges “free”, ignoring the existing Federal loan subsidies and their market distortions. He rightly sees Wall Street and bank bailouts as a symptom of cronyism, yet flip-flopped away from supporting a bill to audit the Federal Reserve. He rightly sees unemployment as an issue, yet he is crusading for a $15 minimum wage which would create mandatory unemployment for perhaps millions of unskilled workers. He rightly calls out Big Pharma, insisting they have also fallen victim to the regulatory capture of Washington lobbyists, yet offers the solution of…even more regulations.
Bernie Sanders is the type of man who can point out specific grants of government privilege to private companies, then turn around and say “Unfettered free trade has been a disaster for the American people” without a hint of irony. All too often the “cure” to any given issue is to intensify the disease. After fifty years and $20,000,000,000,000 spent waging the War on Poverty without any appreciable alleviation of poverty, Bernie’s solution is riveting: spend more money on the same old programs.
To continue reading: Bernie Sanders, Another Beltway Phony
