The limits of Bernie Sanders socialism

There has been a big shift in how we talk about capitalism in America over the last eight years or so—ever since Bernie Sanders became a national figure. He was the first major politician to openly criticize the billionaire class, and capitalism as a whole. He made social inequality the main theme of his two (failed) presidential campaigns. Nothing like that had happened in this country in a long time, probably since FDR. Obviously this has been a good thing. But there are serious limits to this kind of critique of capitalism, which I want to point out a bit here.

I haven’t kept up with Bernie at all in recent years. His whole moment feels like it has passed. But he is still doing his thing (sort of). Apparently he has a new book out, called It’s Ok to Be Angry About Capitalism. I certainly won’t read it, but even the title also shows the shortcomings of his whole approach to economic justice. What is the point of what he’s doing? Giving soft liberals permission to be angry about capitalism? Who needs his permission? Who is asking for that? And this gets to what his real role has always been within the Democrat Party—an opening for outrage at the system, but also a closed off point, because he won’t take that outrage anywhere new or truly dangerous. It’s all about catharsis and about redirecting the well-deserved rage and scorn for the system, and for Democrats, safely back into the Democrat fold. He takes energy that could go elsewhere—including a third party that would easily trounce the wildly unpopular two existing parties—and makes sure it doesn’t go anywhere or do anything.

Anyway, this tweet he made today summarizes what’s wrong with his whole approach pretty well.

Bernie Sanders @BernieSanders

Think about this. The average billionaire on the Forbes 400 list could spend $10,000 every single day for 274 years and still have billions of dollars left in the bank. Don't you think that maybe, just maybe, these guys should be paying more in income tax than a teacher?

This is true, billionaires do have a lot of money, but it still misses the point—we wouldn't have to tax billionaires if they didn't get all that money in the first place. Taxation is always playing catch up, on the back end—more control on the front end would solve the problem. The issue isn’t that billionaires aren’t being taxed enough—it’s that they took all that money to begin with! Once you have billionaires in a society, you have already lost—you can never tax them enough to make up for the damage that their very existence indicates.

Bernie is saying that your anger with capitalism is justified—billionaires are very rich, after all! And that this anger can be solved by taxing the billionaires more than they are being taxed now. But this is all just plugging up holes on a leaking ship. Unless you stop people from taking all the money on the front end, all that we will have is half-measures, like chickenshit taxes and anger. Indeed, the fact that Bernie is promoting taxation and emotional venting is an admission that nothing will change. The best that we can hope for if we follow him is slightly better taxation—which changes very little—and a lot of emotional venting at the injustice of the system.