Bernie Sanders Was Inevitable: A Mixed Economy Devolves to Full Socialism

To those who grasp how the logic of competing premises always ends with victory of the most consistent premises …

To those who grasp how the premises of the mixed economy—free markets warring with government controls—always tend toward full socialism …

There is nothing new, here.
 

The pundits of the Democratic Party and the mainstream media are pretending it is a surprise development.

What is flabbergasting is that the politicos and pundits of the Democratic Party and the mainstream media are pretending it is a surprise development.

A field of some 20 self-declared candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination included declared socialist Bernie Sanders and a bouquet of liberal-leftists advocating every variant on the interventionist-welfare state. Certainly not socialism! Not us!

The news now is that the field of candidates has collapsed to five. Bernie Sanders remains, but two of the other mixed-economy candidates, Mayor Peter Buttigieg, a gay identity candidate and a supposed moderate with a widely-interventionist agenda) and Amy Klobuchar (appeal of the unknown) have thrown in the towel. More significantly, they have endorsed former vice president, Joseph Biden, who is closest to Sanders in the polls.

Why, after this bitterly fought primary, where Democrats trashed Democrats in debate after debate in their scramble for power, turn and endorse their rival? One reason: they long to defeat President Donald Trump and are convinced that against an avowed socialist, Trump will win.

They do not think the American people are ready (yet) to buy full, avowed, consistent socialism.

No withdrawing hopeful for the nomination has endorsed Sanders (who seems to lead the pack). Again, it is not because they don’t prefer the avowed socialism of Sanders. It is because they do not think the American people are ready (yet) to buy full, avowed, consistent socialism.

Moe Vela, former senior adviser to Biden, said in a radio interview that Trump “is a master at defining his opponent.” And he “will have an absolute heyday with a socialist opponent. … He will destroy Bernie. By the time he’s done, [Sanders] will be stuck in a corner crying somewhere.”

That would be nice.

As of now, the “Super Tuesday” bonanza of primaries, 14 states and the U.S. territory of American Samoa, confirm that former Vice President Joseph Biden—the life raft of Democrats terrified that Sanders socialism will hand Trump a second term—has scored a reassuring victory in most states. Sanders is not out of the running. But Elizabeth Warren almost is and the nauseating spectacle of Michael Bloomberg spending hundreds of millions of his own money to become president, may be over. He won the six votes of U.S. territory American Samoa.

The mixed economy—a prayerful yearning for a middle way between socialism and capitalism—inevitably resolves itself into one system or the other.

For more than a century, the leading theorists of free-market economics, advocates of laissez faire capitalism, such as Austrian School of Economics founder, Ludwig von Mises, and University of Chicago Nobelist Friedrich von Hayek, have demonstrated that the mixed economy—a prayerful yearning for a middle way between socialism and capitalism—inevitably resolves itself into one system or the other. In our time, driven by the reigning morality of altruism and by collectivist premises, the mixed economy has evolved, as though inevitably, toward socialism.

The process takes time. At war are the logic of the market economy and its record as the engine of prosperity with freedom, and the morality of altruism which is socialism’s prime fuel. In practice, the process is imposition of interventions in the free market that create distortions, which are then blamed on the market, and result in further intervention allegedly to correct them. It is a powerful dynamic as rent controls lead to housing shortages, which lead to the solution of public housing; and government inflation of the money supply intended to support permanent growth, leads to economic booms, which end in economic busts, which justify regulations to prevent “the capitalist boom-and-bust cycle.”

Today, the desperation to defeat President Trump drives the Democratic candidates toward the safe centrist candidate, Joe Biden. They do not support Biden because they like him, but because they are afraid Sanders will be beaten, resulting in four more years of Trump. When Harry Reid, former Senate majority leader from Nevada, rushed to endorse Biden, Faiz Shakir, Sanders’s campaign manager—but formerly on Reid’s staff—commented: “I’ll forever have respect and love for Senator Reid. But I’m old enough to remember when he thought Biden’s ideas were worthy of being put in a fireplace.” It is the same scrambling competition of liberal-leftist factions that in Germany in the 1930s cleared the way for the fully consistent totalitarian socialist dictatorship of Adolf Hitler. And the welter of socialist factions of the early 20th century that lost to the fully consistent totalitarian Bolshevik communist dictatorship of Vladimir Lenin.

We are fortunate, today, that the competition for political power in America is not exclusively by variants of the mixed economy welfare-state. At least in 2020, the ferociously competing power-seeking of the left will be pitted against a hugely successful American businessman and first-term president whose policy has been to deregulate—and free—the economy, especially in the vital field of energy—and sustain an American economy with profits, growth, employment, and wages hitting record highs. Economically, his worst fault has been to demand low-interest rates and quantitative easing to keep the stock market booming. And, of course, his protectionist stances have annoyed the purists.

Take no comfort. We are one man, one election, away from an outright socialist (Sanders) or another one-stop-away-from-socialism-in-effect government (Biden, Bloomberg, Gabbard, or Warren).
 

Students for the most part are unaware of the economic arguments for capitalism and socialism.

In revealing research on why so many college students are resolutely, unshakably socialist, Stephen Hicks, professor of philosophy at Rockford University, points out that students for the most part are unaware of the economic arguments for capitalism and socialism. For the most part, they are unaware of the murderous history of the Soviet Union and other communist dictatorships. They are unmoved by arguments based on that experience. In general, they are unaware of the experience in Venezuela. Instead, to take just three points made by Prof. Hicks, 1) they are passionate about issues such as domination of profits and government influence by ‘cronyism’; 2) yearning for a society in which we don’t think primarily of ourselves but ‘all of us’ as a family; and 3) the need to be ‘modern’ in our management of the economy, controlling use of natural resources and reducing waste.

And so, at his Super Tuesday party in Vermont Sanders told his supporters that what makes his movement unique is that he taking on the “corporate establishment” and the “greed of Wall Street and the greed of the drug companies … and the greed of the insurance companies.” Words that Warren had repeated ad nauseam, too.

Among students, there is passion for ‘communalism,’ the idea that it takes a village to raise a child, that we are a family, a community. It is rhetoric heard every single day in Sanders’s campaigning. And remember: These ideals are rarely offset by any knowledge of economics or any historical familiarity with the actual record of socialism. Cite the capitalist engine of production and prosperity and you register a strong negative with another dominating concern: wasteful overproduction depleting resources.

Those Sanders voters are in their twenties. They give Sanders an often-cited campaigning advantage, a “grass-roots army” of volunteer campaign workers.
 

Photo by tiffany98101

Working out the logic of socialist moral and economic premises in competition with capitalism—now a merely default ‘conservative position’—is far advanced. If Trump’s appeal holds in 2020, without a market crash after the longest bull market in history, we may have four more years of a quiescent mixed economy provided by a non-ideological, non-theoretical traditionalist. (Even if he says his favorite novel is The Fountainhead.) 

It will be infinitely better than Sanders, Biden, Bloomberg, Gabbard, or Warren. We know from the Obama administration the damage that can be done by a pragmatic-talking closet leftist—in health care, environmentalism, opposition to fossil fuels and drilling, law enforcement, financial regulation, Supreme Court appointments, and encouragement of the careers and ambitions of thousands of budding leftists.
 

If Trump is elected, it will be another four years to make the case to the younger generation, especially minority groups, for capitalism—a crucial educational process not yet making headway.

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About the Author: Walter Donway

Walter Donway has written and edited for Savvy Street since its inception in 2014. His essays and interpretative commentaries on breakthrough books have dealt with philosophy, politics, literature, science, history, psychology, and personalities. His new novel, "Retaking College Hill,” became Amazon’s #1 bestseller in political fiction. This year, the Atlas Society published his Pocket Guide to The Fountainhead and Romanticism Reborn--essays on the Romantic movement in literature and its 20th Century revival in Ayn Rand's novels. His collections of essays and short stories and his "Collected Poems" are available on Amazon. He lives in East Hampton with his wife, Robin.