The Foolish Socialism of Bernie Sanders

From A. Barton Hinkle, at Reason, "Let the presidential candidate have his way and watch the U.S. economy implode":

A couple of weeks ago, Sanders took an uncompromising stand against deodorant proliferation. A growing economy doesn’t matter to most people if all the benefits of growth are going to the top 1 percent, he told CNBC: “You can’t just continue growth for the sake of growth. ... 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.”

Sanders doesn’t oppose deodorant per se, thank goodness. Rather, as a writer at Demos put it, Sanders would “gladly cut poverty and inequality even if it meant a reduction in superficial product innovation.”

He objects to “the dizzying (and socially useless) number of products in the deodorant category. ... (C)utting poverty and inequality is worth a reduction in innovation, and oh by the way, the kinds of things we call ‘innovation’ are often little more than new marketing gimmicks with dubious social value.” And that, friends and neighbors, is why “we should distribute the national income more evenly.”

This is superficially appealing. We can all think of products that strike us as stupid and useless (Uggs? Pickle-flavored potato chips? Country music?). And we can all think of better recipients for the money spent on them: Starving children. Endangered elephants. Cancer research. In what kind of universe does Kanye West deserve millions in income while homeless veterans are eating out of garbage cans?

But the superficial appeal quickly fades in the face of two competing considerations—one practical, the other principled.

For a peek at the practical argument, avail yourself of a fine little vignette from The Washington Post: “In an Online World, Cuba Remains a Stand-in-Line Society.” At Havana’s state-run retail hubs, reports Nick Miroff, “Customers with long shopping lists face no fewer than seven places to stand in line. One for butter. Another for cooking oil. A third for toothpaste. And so on.” The caption to a dismal accompanying photograph shows people waiting “hours for their government ration of chicken.”

This is what happens when central planners think they can allocate economic resources better than the unguided hand of individual free choice...

But remember, the left's elitist, know-it-all Marxists will argue that Cuba's "actually existing socialism" is a perversion of the genuine Utopian socialism of the Marxist dialectical ideal. Nothing proves socialism wrong "because it's never been tried."

That's the left's Big Lie of the 20th century --- and increasingly, the 21st.