There’s the run-of-the-mill Democrat politician who doesn’t understand the free market. And then there’s Bernie Sanders, the self-proclaimed “socialist” who represents Vermont in the U.S. Senate.
Sanders, 73, is technically an independent but caucuses with the Democratic minority in the Senate. He’s also running against Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination for President—so far, her only announced major challenger.
Here was Bernie Sanders’s ridiculous comment on CNBC about how deodorant is causing American children to go hungry:
“If 99 percent of all the new income goes to the top 1 percent, you could triple it, it wouldn’t matter much to the average middle class person. The whole size of the economy and the GDP doesn’t matter if people continue to work longer hours for low wages and you have 45 million people living in poverty. You can’t just continue growth for the sake of growth in a world in which we are struggling with climate change and all kinds of environmental problems. All right? 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—as a U.S. Senator, one of the most powerful people in the nation—seems to think that, because some corporation is making money off of deodorant, that’s somehow a net negative for the entire economy.
Newsflash: if there was only one type of deodorant, the only impact it would have on children would be to increase starvation—because the jobs that a business creates while trying to build a competitive product would be gone. And most people would smell substantially worse because, without any competition, the sole remaining deodorant company would be able to charge virtually anything they want for a stick.
Sanders—who, arguably, is the most liberal elected official in America—shows the logical flaws in the Democrats’ complete misunderstanding of economics that’s not always immediately evident, because he takes it to such a leftist extreme. The economy is not a finite pie: when the rich do better, they’re not taking that money directly from the poor. There’s not an exact amount of money that everyone’s fighting for.
In fact, when the rich get richer, everyone gets richer. The rich don’t stuff money in their mattress: their millions and billions get reinvested through the economy, which creates jobs and makes everyone richer.
Unfortunately for “socialists” like Bernie Sanders, if he’s President, we’ll all be worse off economically—rich and poor alike. And we’ll all smell a lot worse, too.
