Bernie Sanders has said: “American journalists talk about how bad a country is because people are lining up for food. That’s a good thing! In other countries people don’t line up for food; the rich get the food and the poor starve.”
It’s an amazing statement. It’s the sort of pollyanna view that ONLY someone who owns multiple homes and lives in a largely free market society could say about socialism. It’s a pollyanna view … about socialism. Billionaires, risk-takers, hard workers, producers and entrepreneurs … they don’t get the same free pass as socialism does, not with Bernie Sanders.
It’s what we mean by virtue-signaling. Bernie Sanders is a world class virtue-signaler. So are his supporters, many of them hapless and ignorant young people who wouldn’t know a bread line if they bumped into one tomorrow. They get to endorse socialism without having to face ANY of the real-life consequences.
Bernie Sanders, his wife and his loved ones never intend to wait in bread lines. But in their world view, bread lines are OK for SOME because — well, it beats starvation. Completely evaded is the fact that capitalism is the first and only system of economics to make delivery of food SO efficient, guaranteed and cheap that people in capitalist societies become too fat. Especially poor people.
The evasion is positively mind-numbing. There’s no hope for Bernie Sanders intellectually, and there’s probably no hope for most of his supporters, either. The only thing that will convince them that capitalism is superior to socialism? Heaven forbid: for them to someday soon live in a country where the grocery shelves are bare, like Venezuela right now. Even then they will scream, “It’s all Trump’s fault”.
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