Bernie the Socialist

For John, BLUF:  It appears that Senator Bernie Sanders has no historic understanding or memory.  No historic feel, at least from a Western perspective.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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The Time-Warp Socialist

Here is the sub-headline:

Bernie Sanders’s vision has been refuted by reality—and history.

From City Journal, by Mr Guy Sorman, 26 February 2020.

Here is the lede plus three:

Socialism these days is like the Hydra of lore: for every head chopped off, the monster regrows two.  One cannot escape this metaphor when watching Bernie Sanders’s seemingly irresistible progress toward the Democratic presidential nomination.  He defines himself as a socialist and clearly meets the criteria, starting with the historical models that he cites.  The European social-democratic template of the 1960s, as achieved in the Scandinavian countries (the so-called Swedish model) and in France and Germany, is Sanders’s blueprint for the United States.  Nostalgia likely inspires Sanders, at least to some degree—social democracy was at its peak when he was young.

The same nostalgia, mixed with a significant dose of ignorance, may explain his positive comments about Fidel Castro’s regime in Cuba.  He could not bring himself to condemn totally a government that had launched literacy programs.  This is the classic posture of the “useful idiot,” Lenin’s term for intellectual admirers of Communist regimes.  Sanders shows no sympathy for Communism’s victims and voices no qualms about Castro’s violence.  And he gets the facts wrong:  Cuba’s people were educated before Castro seized power, and they had the most reliable health-care system in Latin America.  Sanders’s admiration for Castro and other dictators in the region—he often mentions Nicaragua—reveals an attraction for the aesthetics of violence, widely shared among leftists.  In Marxist parlance:  one can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs.  Sanders, perhaps, would not mind breaking some eggs to achieve his goals.

Sanders touts the proverbial free lunch:  a free national health system and free education.  As free lunches don’t exist, someone would have to pay for all this—presumably the rich, though Sanders avoids giving specific figures.

This vision may sound new and attractive to the young, but it has all been tried before. In Europe, where we do have national health systems and national pension systems, the results have been ghastly.  The financial burden does not fall on the shoulders of the wealthy, because we don’t have enough rich people; all taxpayers foot the bill for national health-care service.  France finances Social Security, which includes health and pensions, with a withholding tax.  Consequently, France has a chronically high unemployment rate, around 10 percent, because the cost of labor is too high, a disincentive to recruit new employees.  The cost of labor also makes our products and services less competitive.  When British or French citizens go to the doctor or buy drugs, it looks “free”:  we don’t pay out of pocket, because we already paid, through our taxes.  Such public-health systems control how much doctors and other health workers can be paid.  In the United Kingdom, they are considered public civil servants.  In France, a general practitioner is paid 25 euros ($28) for an office consultation.

Senator Bernie Sanders seems not to have learned anything from the events of the last 50 years.  Nor did he learn from Secretary Nikita Khrushchev, who told us about the crimes of Joseph Stalin.  His understanding of Cuba and Fidel Castro seems flawed.  Willfully flawed.

One man off the beam is one thing, but millions of voters following him is another.  What are those people thinking?  More important, who was educating them over all those years?  It sounds like a failure of our education system.  Is this a reflection of the long march through the institutions?♠

Hat tip to the InstaPundit.

Regards  —  Cliff

♠  Funnily enough, in neither this article nor the Wikipedia article on the Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci was Democratic Presidential Candidate Mayor Pete Buttigieg's Father mentioned.  The elder Buttigieg, a Professor at Notre Dame, was an influential translator of Mr Gramsci's works.