(Feb. 14) Upon seeing the way young voters flock to Bernie Sanders, the temptation is to grab them all by the shoulders, shake them until they think they’ve been in an earthquake, and demand proof that they actually have brains.
To support an avowed socialist like the Vermont senator is to be historically illiterate — indeed, willfully ignorant on that front — and arithmetically inept to boot. Sanders and his agenda are a spasm of self-deluding fantasy, a phantasmagorical utopia utterly unmoored from reality. It’s a bad political acid trip, a daft dream descending into a nihilistic nightmare.
At some point, adults should be expected to think and act like adults. Adults exercising citizenship rights should do the basic five minutes of research necessary to discover that socialism hasn’t, doesn’t, and cannot work. Plus, basic common sense and simple math expose Sanders’s promises as nonsense of the 2+2=95 variety.
With promises variously estimated to cost between $60 trillion and $97 trillion over 10 years, meaning as much as 70% of GDP, even before accounting for any slowdown in economic growth that his taxes and regulations would likely cause, Sanders could not possibly keep this nation economically viable while trying his radical, wealth-leveling schemes.
As for the historical record, nobody need slander Sanders as a genocidal megalomaniac to say there’s nonetheless good reason socialist utopias have consistently led to death and destruction — the deaths of 100 million people last century. As we are seeing again in Venezuela today, poverty, famine, and destruction are merely socialism’s natural results.
Meanwhile, the attempt of most Sanders backers to draw a distinction between the hard socialism of the Chavez-Maduro Venezuela and the supposedly “democratic socialism” of Scandinavian countries is pure myth. Not only are the Nordic nations not socialist, but they have prospered in recent decades in almost direct proportion to the distance they have moved away from socialism, toward free markets….
[The full column is at this link.]
