Posted on 05/27/2015 6:25:26 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Socialist genius Bernie Sanders has figured out what’s really ailing America.
Our store shelves have too many different brands of deodorant and sneakers. Just look at all those horrible, fully stocked aisles at Target and Walgreens and Walmart and Payless and DSW and Dick’s Sporting Goods. It’s a national nightmare! If only consumers had fewer choices in the free market, fewer entrepreneurs offering a wide variety of products, and fewer workers manufacturing goods that people wanted, Sanders believes, we could end childhood hunger.
Nobody parodies the far Left better than far-leftists themselves.
In an interview with financial journalist John Harwood on Tuesday, Sanders detailed his grievances with an overabundance of antiperspirants and footwear. “You don’t necessarily need a choice of 23 underarm spray deodorants or of 18 different pairs of sneakers when children are hungry in this country. I don’t think the media appreciates the kind of stress that ordinary Americans are working on.”
Try to suppress a snicker: Sanders, Decider of Your Sanitary and Footwear Needs, is casting himself as the Everyman in touch with “ordinary Americans” to contrast his campaign with Hillary “my Beltway lobbyist and foreign-agent operator Sid Blumenthal is just a friend I talk to for advice” Clinton.
Blech. By the looks of the 2016 Democratic presidential field, liberals really do practice the anti-choice principles they preach.
At Caracas–on–the–Green Mountains, every business owner’s success robs starving babies of vital nutrition. Because some tummies may be grumbling somewhere across the fruited plain, all must suffer. In Sanders’s world, it’s the “greedy”– America’s real makers, builders, and wealth creators — who must be punished and shamed, specifically with a personal-income-tax-rate hiked to a whopping 90 percent for top earners.
Of course, the wealth redistributors in Washington never bear any of the blame for misspending the billions they confiscate. Nearly 100 million Americans participated in dozens of federal food-assistance programs in 2014. The General Accounting Office reported last year that $74.6 billion went to food stamps, $11.3 billion went to the national school-lunch program, and $7.1 billion went to the WIC (Women, Infants, and Children) program, along with $1.9 billion for nutrition assistance for Puerto Rico and $10.7 million for a federal milk program.
But no, it’s not the fault of command-and-control bureaucrats and their overseers on Capitol Hill that the War on Poverty and the War on Hunger have failed.
In Sanders’s bubble, childhood hunger is the fault of selfish consumers, self-serving entrepreneurs, and rapacious retailers who engage in voluntary transactions in a free-market economy. Just as Sanders believes there are “too many” products on the shelves, President Obama recently opined that families of America’s top earners in the financial industry “pretty much have more than you’ll ever be able to use and your family will ever be able to use.”
We need not speculate about whether the wealth-shamers’ recipe of less capitalist consumption, fewer private businesses, stifling of entrepreneurship, and more government control over goods and services would result in happier citizens and fuller stomachs. In Venezuela, the shelves are unburdened by “too many” deodorants and shoes and too much soap, milk, or coffee. Food distribution is under military control. The currency of the socialist paradise just collapsed on the black market by 30 percent.
Here in America, dozens of private household-goods companies make billions of dollars selling scented, unscented, quilted, two-ply, white, and colored toilet paper that people want and need. In Sanders’s utopia in South America, the government imposed price controls in the name of redistributing basic goods to the poor and seized a toilet-paper factory to cure the inevitable shortages. The lines are long. The shelves are empty. The daily battle for subsistence is brutal.
Take it from those who suffer most under the unbridled fulfillment of “you didn’t build that” and “you don’t need that” radicalism: It stinks.
— Michelle Malkin is author of the new book Who Built That: Awe-Inspiring Stories of American Tinkerpreneurs
Rational discourse will not persuade Sanders’ intended audience.
Telling ‘em exactly what they want to hear - that vices are virtues and that the costly shall be free (on the backs of the rich) - is where they stop listening and start voting.
Bernie’s voters see rows of shelves stuffed with gleaming products, and lament that it isn’t free. They can’t see past the products to the shelves holding them, and the immense payments required to fill those shelves.
Ol’ BS can impose a 90% marginal rate on hisownself and send it in. Does he show/lead the way on this? Of course not.
“If all the Forbes billionaires agreed to limit themselves to their basic billion and handed over the excess to Uncle Sam, Uncle Sam would end up with some $90 billion without one member of the club having to give up a single necessity or, for that matter, a single luxury...not a house, not a car, not a boat, not nothing."
What was obviously left unsaid and perhaps unconsidered by Mr Hewitt was the dual unknowns of this proposal, what would happen to the economy if the 1995 Bill Gates / Larry Ellison / Steve Jobs were deprived of company control through the sequestration of their wealth (just to name 3) AND what kind of steward of that one-time windfall wealth the government (politicians) would be?
Senator Sanders is in this same line of 'distinguished' thinkers who consider government as the proprietor of all wealth and should limit its distribution in order to bring equitable OUTCOME!
I regard Sen. Sanders as the comic relief of the Democrat-Socialists for the 2016 Presidential Campaign. He makes Hillary look less leftist than she really is by running to her public left.
Remember, To Leftists, Especially in America, East Germany wasn't a Warning.
It was a Goal.
I see socialism as a distant relative to a gambling addiction because they are both are based on greed, have the end result of absolute failure and both a mental disorder. I have more respect for the gambler, for he uses his own wealth to further his destruction.
Regarding mental disorders, it’s obvious obama, Hillary and Sanders are not all there.
Our nation is in the grip of mass insanity. Hopefully someone will come out of the woodwork, such as Cruz, that will keep us from going the way of Greece.
I agree with your analysis. Here’s hoping Bernie moves into double digits against Hillary and forces her into debates. Her instincts will be to cut him off at the knees by lurching hard left to undercut him.
That won’t play well with the milquetoasts on the double yellow line when the general election rolls around.
Yes, Hillary & Sanders are not all there.
That’s not the issue.
The issue is that there’s a remarkably good chance that 51% of voters will vote for them.
I seem to remember that in the old Soviet Union, the government decided how many kinds of deodorant, rolls of toilet paper or loaves of bread were to be produced as part of a five year economic plan. The result was long lines of consumers waiting to buy scarce products, empty store shelves and constant shortages. I do not believe that soviet style socialism prevented children from starving and in fact mass starvation was used by Stalin as retribution against political enemies.
Also left out is how long that $90 billion would last in government spending, and to what level the confiscation would be democratically determined to continue down the wealth pyramid.
Power is a very powerful, addictive drug.
Amen
And THAT is Sanders' real mission: Stalking Horse for She Who Must Not Be Named.
If only those deodorant and sneaker companies were turning out food. Kids are hungry, dammit!
Government needs a plan to better allocate resources. It should be forward-thinking, so maybe two, three years ahead. No, let’s make it a five year plan, so we really know what we’re doing.
The ever predictable, and standard reply: “Well, they made mistakes in (INSERT COUNTRY HERE). We can do better than that.”
That INSERT COUNTRY HERE should be a pull-down menu, because there are a lot of those.
Ice cube, meet Blowtorch.
Someone needs to ask Bernie a simple question: Where does wealth come from? He acts as though there’s a finite pot of gold somewhere & mean people are taking it before the poor can get it.
Our population has been miss-educated to the point they don’t understand basic economic principles. Republicans need to start putting together short sound-bites to explain things in simple terms that our younger voters can understand. If they can’t do that we’re definitely going to lose this country to the leftists.
“People have too many choices” is the catchphrase of an anti-freedom authoritarian. This is the reason socialism nearly always ends up in a police state. Somebody has to be in charge of making those choices and, well, what do you know? It’s them!
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